"You never ever volunteered. Not even if a sergeant stood there and said, "We need someone to drink alcohol, bottles of, and make love, passionate, to women, for the use of." There was always a snag. If a choir of angels asked for volunteers for Paradise to step forward, Nobby knew enough to take one smart pace to the rear. (p. 303)"

""No, you listen to me," hissed Vimes. "I mix with crooks and thieves and thugs all day and that doesn't worry me at all but after two minutes with you I need a bath." (p. 301)"

"On the whole, Colon reflected, it was just possible that the worst moment of his life hadn't happened yet. (p. 299)"

"It was such a relief to be right, even though you knew you'd only got there by trying every possible way to be wrong. (p. 281)"

"Not Thou Shalt Not. Say I Will Not. (p. 276)"

"Looking forward to kicking ar—to prodding buttock, sir. (p. 273)"

""Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk..." (p. 273)"

"This is where we've filled ourselves up with so many questions that they're starting to overflow and become answers. (p. 270)"

"It is traditionally the belief of policemen that they can tell what a substance is by sniffing it and then gingerly tasting it, but this practice had ceased in the Watch ever since Constable Flint had dipped his finger into a blackmarket consignment of ammonium chloride cut with radium, said "Yes, this is definitely slab wurble wurble sclup," and had to spend three days tied to his bed until the spiders went away. (p. 266)"

"Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. (p. 258)"

"The butcher shrugged. When people were offering you money it was no time to debate their sanity. (p. 253)"

"He'd got nowhere, and he'd traveled a long way to get there. (p. 232)"

""Carrot, I think you've got something wrong with your head," said Angua."

""The big trouble," he added, "is that everyone wants someone else to read their minds for them and then make the world work properly. (p. 227)"

"He hated the way his mind worked. A proper human being would have shown respect and quietly walked away. But, as he'd stood among the chilly stones, a horrible apprehension had stolen over him that almost all the answers were in place now, if only he could work out the questions. (p. 205)"

"There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell. (p. 202)"

"What a mess the world was in, reflected Vimes. Constable Visit had told him that the meek would inherit it, and what had the poor devils done to deserve that? (p. 198)"

"Vetinari isn't mad."

""They've given us the answers," he said. "Perhaps we can find out what the questions should have been." (p. 184)"

"The Patrician was still breathing, but his face was waxy and he looked as though death might be an improvement. (p. 176)"

"When it came to doing absolutely nothing at all he was among the finest. But it was keeping completely motionless in one place that was his forte. If there were a roll-call for the world's champion non-movers, he wouldn't even turn up. (p. 164)"

""There's not a lot you can say about mining. ‘I mine in my mine and what's mine is mine,'" said Cheery in a singsong voice. (p. 162)"

""Everyone's got ancestors," said the barman calmly. "Otherwise they wouldn't be here." (p. 150)"

"Colon in particular had great difficulty with the idea that you went on investigating after someone had confessed. It outraged his training and experience. You got a confession and there it ended. You didn't go around disbelieving people. You disbelieved people only when they said they were innocent. Only guilty people were trustworthy. Anything else struck at the whole basis of policing. (p. 139)"

"The soup of the afternoon. Yes. In which may well be found the croutons of teatime. (p. 131)"

"Anyway, Angua seemed to have taken this case personally. She always had a soft spot for the underdog."

"People would probably say they had lived blameless lives."

"The Watch was back and out there on the streets, and if they weren't actually as good as Detritus at kicking arse they were definitely prodding buttock. (p. 127)"

"Well, well, well. What a nasty suspicious mind you have, Vimes."

"In a way, it didn't matter who they were. In fact, their anonymity was part of the whole business. They thought themselves part of the march of history, the tide of progress and the wave of the future. They were men who felt that The Time Had Come. Regimes can survive barbarian hordes, crazed terrorists, and hooded secret societies, but they're in real trouble when prosperous and anonymous men sit around a big table and think thoughts like that. (p. 119)"

""Famous I don't know about," said Glod. "It's hard to be famous and alive. I just want to play music every day and hear someone say, ‘Thanks, that was great, here is some money, same time tomorrow, okay?'" (pp. 150-151)"

"How is his lordship?"

"Vimes reached behind the desk and picked up a faded copy of Twurp's Peerage or, as he personally thought of it, the guide to the criminal classes. You wouldn't find slum-dwellers in these pages, but you would find their landlords."

"It didn't matter what a bunch of deranged romantics thought. Facts were facts. (p. 81)"

"It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees. (pp. 77-78)"

"Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again. (p. 77)"

"Lord Vetinari represented stability. It was a cold and clinical kind of stability, but part of his genius was the discovery that stability was what people wanted more than anything else."

"Rumor is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows—sometimes it does not need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips. (pp. 66-67)"

"Who was she kidding? It was easy to be a vegetarian by day. It was preventing yourself becoming a humanitarian at night that took the real effort. (p. 59)"

"People kept on talking about the true king of Ankh-Morpork, but history taught a cruel lesson. It said—often in words of blood—that the true king was the one who got crowned. (p. 50)"

"It was Carrot who'd suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to "serve the community" by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork"s crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get into it sideways. (p. 45)"

"“His wife’s told him a coat of arms is the thing to have, and who are we to argue with the daughter of a tripe merchant."

""We're just one big family and, when you've been to a few domestic disputes, Littlebottom, I can assure you that you'll see the resemblance." (p. 22)"

""All right," he said. "So sometimes it's an easy answer. But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes we don't even know if it was the right question." (p. 22)"

"Vimes was good at making the kind of rich enemies who could afford to employ assassins. The assassins had to be lucky only once, but Vimes had to be lucky all the time. (p. 19)"

"Hmm. Going thin on top. Definitely a receding scalp there. Less hair to comb but, on the other hand, more face to wash... (p. 8)"

"He hated the very idea of the world being divided into the shaved and the shavers. Or those who wore the shiny boots and those who cleaned the mud off them. Every time he saw Willikins the butler fold his, Vimes's, clothes, he suppressed a terrible urge to kick the butler's shiny backside as an affront to the dignity of man. (p. 6)"