Discworld

"Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings. (p. 303)"

"Although it was against the thread, Deacon Cusp had his head screwed on. (p. 300)"

"Yes, sergeant?"

"Mind like a steel ball, Om had said. Nothing got in or out. So all Vorbis could hear were the distant echoes of his own soul. And out of the distant echoes he would forge a Book of Vorbis, and Brutha suspected he knew what the commandments would be. There would be talk of holy wars and blood and crusades and blood and piety and blood. (p. 288)"

"Dhblah sidled closer. This was not hard. Dhblah sidled everywhere. Crabs thought he walked sideways. (p. 287)"

"Om, bumping along in Brutha's pack, began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist. (p. 274)"

"I taught myself. I'm entirely self-taught. You can't find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing. (p. 271)"

""He's muffed it," said Simony. "he could have done anything with them. And he just told them a lot of facts. You can't inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol." (p. 263)"

""Listen, Urn. The Church is run by people like Vorbis. That's how it all works. Millions of people have died for—for nothing but lies. We can stop all that—" (p. 263)"

"And this will go on happening, whether you believe it is true or not. It is real. (p. 262)"

"The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish. (p. 261)"

"The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god). (p. 260)"

"It's not my fault if people misuse the—"

"A Great God. Mighty were his dominions and magnificent was his word. Armies went forth in his name and conquered and slew. That kind of thing. And now no one, not you, not me, no one, even knows who this god was or his name or what he looked like. (p. 257)"

"There's bones everywhere!"

"But how much worse to have been a god, and to now be no more than a smoky bundle of memories, blown back and forth across the sand made from the crumbled stones of your temples... (p. 247)"

"I saw you standing close to Vorbis," said Urn. "I thought you were protecting him."

"Do unto others before they do unto you. (p. 243)"

"He heard Om, slightly peevish, say: "People've got to believe in something. Might as well be gods. What else is there?""

""Why do people need gods?" Brutha persisted."

"What, lolling around all day while slaves do the real work? Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place while those fellows are living like—"

"Yeah. Pretty good, eh? Started off with nothing but a shepherd hearing voices in his head, ended up with two million people."

"You gave a god its shape, like a jelly fills a mold."

"Is there any water to drink?"

"Gods never need to be very bright when there are humans around to be it for them. (p. 221)"

"Gods are not very introspective. It has never been a survival trait. The ability to cajole, threaten, and terrify has always worked well enough. When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point-of-view is seldom necessary. (p. 221)"

"He thought: the worst thing about Vorbis isn't that he's evil, but that he makes good people do evil. He turns people into things like himself. (p. 209)"

"Thoughts always moved slowly through Brutha's mind, like icebergs. They arrived slowly and left slowly and when they were there they occupied a lot of space, much of it below the surface. (p. 209)"

""I know that type," said Didactylos. "All holy piety in public, and all peeled grapes and self-indulgence in private." (p. 204)"

"You're not one of us."

"Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Laste the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed. (p. 177)"

"He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at. (p. 174)"

"I know about sureness," said Didactylos. Now the light irascible tone had drained out of his voice. "I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. This was before the borders were closed, when you still let people travel. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?"

""But is all this true?" said Brutha."

"Books shouldn't be kept too close together, otherwise they interact in strange and unforseeable ways. (p. 169)"

"Brutha wished he was a better scholar so he could ask his God why this was."

""Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis."

"His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools—the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans—and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, "You can't trust any bugger any further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink. Mine's a double, if you're buying. Thank you. And a packet of nuts. Her left bosom is nearly uncovered, eh? Two more packets, then!" (pp. 154-155)"

""Chain letters," said the Tyrant. "The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain—the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn." (pp. 153-154)"

"Peace negotiations were not going well."

"The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote†. Every five years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy. Immediately after he was elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal madman and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher in the streets looking for a towel. And then five years later they elected another one just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent people kept on making the same mistakes."

"Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time. (p. 149)"

"We get that in here some nights, when someone's had a few. Cosmic speculation about whether the gods really exist. Next thing, there's a bolt of lightning through the door with a note wrapped round it saying, ‘Yes, we do' and a pair of sandals with smoke coming out."

""Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races... very handy." (p. 145)"

""That's right," he said. "We're philosophers. We think, therefore we am." (p. 141)"

"People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time. (pp. 135-136)"

""That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles." (p. 131)"

""What's a philosopher?" said Brutha."

"Something about him generally made people think of the word "spry," but, at the moment, they would be much more likely to think of the words "mother naked" and possibly also "dripping wet" and would be one hundred percent accurate, too. (pp. 128-129)"

"The Ephebians had gods in the same way that other cities had rats. (p. 127)"