"Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Meters, the Mile, the Marathon—he’d run them all. Later, when he learned with some surprise what the word actually meant, he’d been equally certain he wasn’t one. He was a person who divided the world quite simply into people who were trying to kill him and people who weren’t. That didn’t leave much room for fine details like what color anyone was. (pp. 43-44)"

"“I always thought that old fossils might have a lot to teach us,” said Ponder. “Perhaps I was wrong,” he added darkly. “Well, I for one have never believed all that business about dead animals turning into stone,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. “It’s against all reason. What’s in it for them?” “So how do you explain fossils, then?” said Ponder. “Ah, you see, I don’t,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, with a triumphant smile. “It saves so much trouble in the long run. How do skinless sausages hold together, Mister Stibbons?” “What? Eh? How should I know something like that?” “Really? You don’t know that but you think you’re entirely qualified to know how the whole universe was put together, do you? Anyway, you don’t have to explain fossils. They’re there. Why try to turn everything into a big mystery? If you go around asking questions the whole time you’ll never get anything done.” (p. 37)"

"Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn’t always beat actual thought. (p. 34)"

"Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn’t have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you’d started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line. (pp. 32-33)"

"“But we’re a university! We have to have a library!” said Ridcully. “It adds tone. What sort of people would we be if we didn’t go into the Library?” ”Students,” said Senior Wrangler morosely. (p. 22)"

"Elsewhere, someone might have said, “It’s just books! Books aren’t dangerous!” But even ordinary books are dangerous, and not only the ones like Make Gelignite the Professional Way. A man sits in some museum somewhere and writes a harmless book about political economy and suddenly thousands of people who haven’t even read it are dying because the ones who did haven’t got the joke. Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber. (p. 21)"

"Any true wizard, faced with a sign like “Do not open this door. Really. We mean it. We’re not kidding. Opening this door will mean the end of the universe,” would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss was about. This made signs rather a waste of time, but at least it meant that when you handed what was left of the wizard to his grieving relatives you could say, as they grasped the jar, “We told him not to.” (p. 21)"

"Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. The goal is the Theory of Everything, but Ponder would settle for the Theory of Something and, late at night, when Hex appeared to be sulking, he despaired of even a Theory of Anything. (p. 19)"

"In theory, because of the nature of L-space, absolutely everything was available to him, but that only meant that it was more or less impossible to find whatever it was you were looking for, which is the purpose of computers. (p. 19)"

"Paleontology and archaeology and other skulduggery were not subjects that interested wizards. Things are buried for a reason, they considered. There’s no point in wondering what it was. Don’t go digging things up in case they won’t let you bury them again. (p. 18)"

"“When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators, Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.” (p. 16)"

"Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association. His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled “Me, who does the telling” and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled “Everyone else.” (p. 16)"

"It was Ponder’s particular genius that he had found a way around this by considering the phrase, “How do you know it’s not possible until you’ve tried?” And experiments with Hex, the University’s thinking engine, had found that, indeed, many things are not impossible until they have been tried. Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting thing when people have actually found a way of doing it, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all. When something is tried, Ponder found, it often does turn out to be impossible very quickly, but it takes a little while for this to really be the case†—in effect, for the overworked laws of causality to hurry to the scene and pretend it has been impossible all along."

"Ponder knew he should never have let Ridcully look at the invisible writings. Wasn’t it a basic principle never to let your employer know what it is you actually do all day? (p. 13)"

"They say the heat and the flies here can drive a man insane. But you don’t have to believe that, and nor does that bright mauve elephant that just cycled past. (pp. 11-12)"

"Something as artificial and human as an hour wouldn’t last five minutes here. (p. 11)"

"You couldn’t stop Tradition. You could only add to it. (p. 3)"

"We might find out why mankind is here, although that is more complicated and begs the question “Where else should we be?” (p. 2)"

"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of “true.” (p. 2)"

"And then everyone was just running, because everyone else was running. (p. 436)"

"Besides, the intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it. (p. 436)"

"And, of course, very few people do know how Tradition is supposed to go. There's a certain mysterious ridiculousness about it by its very nature—once there was a reason why you had to carry a posy of primroses on Soul Cake Tuesday, but now you did it because...that's what was Done. (p. 436)"

"Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we'd be melting the bronze already. (p. 427)"

"Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being reexamined and reevaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands. (p. 426)"

"The point about burning your boats is that you shouldn't be standing on them when you drop the match. (p. 390)"

""You are making a mockery of the whole business, Vimes!" said Lord Rust."

"You can't arrest the commander of an army!"

"For the serious empire-builder there was no such thing as a final frontier. (p. 378)"

"I'm not a natural killer! See this? See what it says? I'm supposed to keep the peace, I am! If I kill people to do it, I'm reading the wrong manual! (p. 367)"

"Somewhere out there was the Ankh-Morpork army, what there was of it. And somewhere waiting was the Klatchian army. And thousands of men who might have quite liked one another had they met socially would thunder toward one another and start killing, and after that first rush you had all the excuses you needed to do it again and again… (pp. 362-363)"

"The man had a point. The man had a whole sword. (p. 362)"

"Experience had taught him never to say things like "I don't like it, it's too quiet." There was no such thing as too quiet. (p. 312)"

"The night is always old. He'd walked too often down dark streets in the secret hours and felt the night stretching away, and known in his blood that while days and kings and empires come and go, the night is always the same age, always aeons deep. Terrors unfolded in the velvet shadows and while the nature of the talons may change, the nature of the beast does not. (p. 294)"

"As they say, ‘If you would seek war, prepare for war.'"

"Vimes prodded at it as politely as he dared, and then took the usual view that, if you can recognize at least half of it, it's probably okay to eat the rest. (pp. 285-286)"

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life. (p. 274)"

"So, Constable Visit, there's a god on our side, is there?"

""Fortune favors the brave, sir," said Carrot cheerfully."

"Angua stopped. Of course, to the unpracticed eye all Klatchians looked alike, but then to a werewolf all humans looked alike: they looked appetizing. (p. 255)"

"They do what they're told, they tend to believe the last thing they heard, they're not bright enough to ask questions, and they have that certain unshakeable loyalty available to those unencumbered by too much intelligence."

"All this was logical. It just wasn't very comforting. (p. 241)"

"71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn't believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren't true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed. (p. 238)"

"Theft was the only crime, whether the loot was gold, innocence, land or life. (p. 234)"

"You told me I ought to listen to the voice of the people. Odd thing, ain't it...you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls."

"History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders. (p. 223)"

"It is always useful to have an enemy who is prepared to die for his country, this means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind. (p. 213)"

"And then he realized why he was thinking like this."

"He had the look of a lawnmower just after the grass had organized a workers' collective. There was a definite suggestion that, deep inside, he knew this was not really happening. It could not be happening because this sort of thing did not happen. Any contradictory evidence could be safely ignored. (p. 204)"

""You, sir, are no gentleman," said Rust."