"You will have worked out that there is a race in this world that steals and kills and spreads disease and despoils what it cannot use, said the voice of Spider. “Yes,” said Dangerous Beans. “That’s easy. It’s called humanity.”"

"“Can I ask a question, sir?” said Maurice, as Death turned to go. ”I suppose there isn’t a Big Cat in the Sky, is there?” Maurice nodded. One good thing about being a cat, apart from the extra lives, was that the theology was a lot simpler."

"“You don’t know about people, do you?” Maurice sighed again. “What? I’m a person!” said Malicia. “So? Cats know about people. We have to. No one else can open cupboards.”"

"A good plan isn’t one where someone wins, it’s where nobody thinks they’ve lost. Understand?"

"“Malicia hasn’t been home all night,” said the mayor. “You think something might have happened to her, sir?” “No, I think she might have happened to someone, man!”"

"“You know nothing about your background at all?” “No.” “Aha!” said Malicia. “That proves it! We all know what happens when a mysterious orphan turns up and challenges someone big and powerful, don’t we? It’s like being the third and youngest son of a king. He can’t help but win!” She looked triumphantly at the crowd. But the crowd looked doubtful. They hadn’t read as many stories as Malicia, and were rather more attached to the experience of real life, which is that when someone small and righteous takes on someone big and nasty, he is grilled bread product, very quickly."

"There was a general murmuring, no real words, nothing that would get anyone into trouble if the piper turned nasty, but a muttering indicating, in a general sense, without wishing to cause umbrage, and seeing everyone’s point of view, and taking one thing with another, and all things being equal, that people would like to see the boy given a chance, if it’s all right with you, no offense meant."

"I’ve seen people playing the trombone, and it doesn’t look too difficult. It’s only an overgrown trumpet, really."

"“You’re all talking?” he said at last. “Yes, sir,” said Nourishing. “So...who’s doing the listening?” he asked."

"To be a leader you have to learn to shout! But after you’ve learned to shout, you have to learn not to!"

"It’s not perfect, but it works. The thing about stories is you have to pick the ones that last."

"It wasn’t that he liked being shot at by hooded figures in the temporary employ of his many and varied enemies, but he’d always looked at it as some kind of vote of confidence. It showed that he was annoying the rich and arrogant people who ought to be annoyed. (p. 3)"

"The sound of running feet indicated that Sergeant Detritus was bringing some of the latest trainees back from their morning run. He could hear the jody Detritus had taught them. Somehow, you could tell it was made up by a troll: “Now we sing dis stupid song!” “Sing it as we run along!” “Why we sing dis we don’t know!” “We can’t make der words rhyme prop’ly!” “Sound off!” “One! Two!” “Sound off!” “Many! Lots!” “Sound Off!” “Er ... What?” (p. 12)"

"After the door had shut one of the watchmen looked up from the desk where he’d been wrestling with a report and the effort of writing down, as policeman do, what ought to have happened. (p. 14)"

"Leggie he lived down there in the crypts. As he said, he was the only one who did, and he liked the company. (p. 19)"

"“You shoot first—“ “—and ask questions later?” said Vetinari. Vimes paused at the door and said: “There’s nothing I want to ask him.” (p. 26)"

"Yes, thought Vimes. That’s the way it was. Privilege, which just means “private law.” Two types of people laugh at the law; those that break it and those that make it. (p. 55)"

"“Then he went on sweeping.“ “Sweeping?” “Oh, it’s the kind of holy thing they do. So they don’t tread on ants, I think. Or they sweep sins away. Or maybe they just like the place clean. Who cares what monks do?” (pp. 56-57)"

"Tell your man to lower that sword, will you? The way he’s waving it around he could hurt someone. (p. 59)"

"The cluttered desk of Vimes’s memory finally unearthed the inadvertent saucer of recollection from under the teacup of forgetfulness. (p. 63)"

"Vimes had mixed memories of Captain Tilden. He had been a military man before being given this job as a kind of pension, and that was a bad thing in a senior copper. It meant he looked to Authority for orders and obeyed them, whereas Vimes found it better to look to Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level. Tilden set too great a store by shiny breastplates and smartness on parade. You had to have some of that stuff, that was true enough. You couldn’t let people slob around. But although he’d never voice the view in public, Vimes liked to see a bit of battered armor around the place. It showed that someone had been battering it. Besides, when you were lurking in the shadows you didn’t want to gleam… (p. 65)"

"Is that Narrative Causality or Historical Imperative or Just Plain Weird? Are we back to the old theory of the self-correcting history? Is there no such thing as an accident, as the Abbott says? Is every accident just a higher-order design? I’d love to find out! (p. 86)"

"And he saw plots and spies everywhere throughout his waking hours, and had men root them out, and the thing about rooting out plots and spies everywhere is that, even if there are no real plots to begin with, there are plots and spies galore very soon. (p. 95)"

"They were honest, in that special policeman sense of the word. That is, they didn’t steal things too heavy to carry. (p. 103)"

"Knock’s face showed a man contemplating an immediate future that contained fewer opportunities for personal gain and a greatly raised risk of being shouted at. (p. 110)"

"What was it Vetinari had said once? “Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces”? Well, the tax farmers were very unsophisticated in the way they went about recouping their investment. (p. 113)"

"There was a future. There had to be. He remembered it. But it only existed as that memory, and that was as fragile as the reflection on a soap bubble and, maybe, just as easily popped. (p. 119)"

"Aloud, he said: “Yes, sir.” It was a good phrase. It could mean any of a dozen things, or nothing at all. It was just punctuation until the man said something else. (p. 121)"

"Sorry for the inconvenience, ladies and gentlemen, but it appears the Unmentionables are not doing business tonight. Looks like we’ll have to do the interrogation ourselves. We’re not very experienced at this, so I hope we don’t get it wrong. Now, listen carefully. Are any of you serious conspirators bent on the overthrow of the government? (p. 124)"

"“Have you really got the eye of a mass-murderer?” “In the pocket of my other suit, yes.” (p. 125)"

"They didn’t like the Unmentionables. Like petty criminals everywhere, the watchmen prided themselves that there were some depths to which they would not sink. There had to be some things below you, even if it was only mudworms. (p. 125)"

"“When I die,“ said Lawn, inspecting the patient, “I’m going to instruct them to put a bell on my tombstone, just so’s I can have the pleasure of not getting up when people ring.” (p. 130)"

"Lawn looked down at his patient. “In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: Am I going to get paid for this?” (p. 131)"

"Vines wasn’t against intellect. Anybody with enough savvy to let go of a doorknob could be a street monster in the old days, but to make it above sergeant you needed a grab bag of guile, cunning, and street wisdom that could pass for “intelligence” in a poor light. (pp. 134-135)"

"Swing, though, started in the wrong place. He didn’t look around, and watch, and learn, and then say, “This is how people are, how do we deal with it?” No, he sat and thought: “This is how people ought to be, how do we change them?” (p. 135)"

"It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them. Swing didn’t seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough-and-ready fashion, force them into becoming honest man. Instead, he’d taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang. (p. 136)"

"Then, just when the whole wretched stew was thickening, he’d invented craniometrics. Bad coppers had always had their ways of finding out if someone was guilty. Back in the old days—hah, now—these included thumbscrews, hammers, small pointed bits of wood and, of course, the common desk drawer, always a boon to the copper in a hurry. Swing didn’t need any of this. He could tell if you were guilty by looking at your eyebrows. He measured people. He used calipers and a steel ruler. And he quietly wrote down the measurements, and did some sums, such as dividing the length of the nose by the circumference of the head and multiplying it by the width of the space between the eyes. And on such figures he could, infallibly, tell that you were devious, untrustworthy, and congenitally criminal. After you spent the next twenty minutes in the company of his staff and their less sophisticated tools of inquiry, he would, amazingly, be proven right. (p. 136)"

"Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority—everyone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn’t, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was. (p. 137)"

"Swordfish? Every password was “swordfish”! Whenever anyone tried to think of a word that no one would ever guess, they always chose “swordfish.“ It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind. (p. 141)"

"Tilden was nearly seventy. At a time like that, a man learned to treat his memory as only a rough guide to events. (p. 154)"

"It was a Guild of Assassins, after all. Black was what you wore. The night was black and so were you. And black had such style, and an Assassin without style, everyone agreed, was just a highly paid arrogant thug. (pp. 158-159)"

"Most of them had already learned that the world was an oyster that could be opened with gold if a blade did not suffice. (p. 159)"

"That was always the dream, wasn’t it? “I wish I knew then what I know now”? But when you got older, you found out that you now wasn’t you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp. (p. 163)"

"The Assassin moved quietly from roof to roof until he was well away from the excitement around the Watch House. His movements could be called catlike, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things. (p. 195)"

"Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact. (p. 195)"

"“May I ask how you found that out, Madam?” “Oh, one hears things,“ Madam said lightly. “One just has to hold money up to one’s ear.“ (p. 196)"

"He is a complication. You may think it best if he…ceased to complicate. (p. 198)"