"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)"

"There is no other god but you. You told Ossory that."

"Don't you know anything? Bodies aren't just handy things for storing your mind in. Your shape affects how you think. It's all this morphology that's all over the place. (pp. 125-126)"

"Winners never talk about glorious victories. That's because they're the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterward. It's only the losers who have glorious victories. (p. 125)"

"For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led. (p. 117)"

"They were sheep, possibly the most stupid animal in the universe with the possible exception of the duck. But even their uncomplicated minds couldn't hear the voice, because sheep don't listen. (p. 116)"

"Words are the litmus paper of the mind. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say "Enter," don't stop to pack. (p. 114)"

"When the Omnian church found out about Koomi, they displayed him in every town within the Church's empire to demonstrate the essential flaws in his argument."

"So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble. (p. 108)"

"Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. (p. 108)"

"I still know that you can't truly be Om. The God would not talk like that about His chosen ones."

""Yes, but humans are more important than animals," said Brutha."

"The sea, Brutha. It washes unholy shores, and gives rise to dangerous ideas. Men should not travel, Brutha. At the center there is truth. As you travel, so error creeps in. (p. 95; spoken by Vorbis, leader of the Inquisition)"

"When the Church traveled, the travelers were very senior people indeed, so when the Church traveled it generally traveled in style. (p. 95)"

"The memory stole over him: a desert is what you think it is. And now, you can think clearly..."

"When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror. (p. 84)"

"Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course. (p. 79)"

"Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think. (p. 76)"

"People have reality-dampers."

"So much of animal life is the recognition of pattern, the shapes of hunter and hunted. To the casual eye the forest is, well, just forest; to the eye of the dove it is so much unimportant fuzzy green background to the hawk which you did not notice on the branch of a tree. To the tiny dot of the hunting buzzard in the heights, the whole panorama of the world is just a fog compared to the scurrying prey in the grass. (p. 62)"

"In the same way, the Quisition could act without possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else? The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds of His exquisitors unless it was right that it should be there. Life could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om. And sometimes quite short, too. (p. 60)"

"Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time. (p. 60)"

"Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned. (p. 50)"

"So," it said, "before unbelievers get burned alive...do you sing to them first?"

"In the rain-forests of Brutha's subconscious the butterfly of doubt emerged and flapped an experimental wing, all unaware of what chaos theory has to say about this sort of thing... (p. 45)"

"Did not the Great God declare, through the Prophet Abbys, that there is no greater and more honorable sacrifice than one's own life for the God?"

""No. None could doubt it," said Fri'it, who had walked across many a battlefield the day after a glorious victory, when you had ample opportunity to see what winning meant. (p. 42)"

"It wouldn't make a lot of difference, evidence never did once you were in the deep levels where accusation had the status of proof, but at least it might leave one or two inquisitors feeling that they might just have been wrong. (pp. 41-42)"

"I swear to me that I am the Great God Om, greatest of gods! (p. 38)"