"Teppic stared into his wine mug. These men are philosophers, he thought. They had told him so. So their brains must be so big that they have room for ideas that no one else would consider for five seconds. On the way to the tavern Xeno had explained to him, for example, why it was logically impossible to fall out of a tree. (p. 213)"

"Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more."

"He [Ptaclusp] put his arms around his sons' shoulders."

"However, it is well known that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next."

"Just because fate throws you together doesn't mean fate's got it right. (p. 312)"

"She had a number of stoutly-held views on a variety of subjects, but most of them involved the flaying alive of people she disapproved of. This meant most people under the age of thirty-five, to start with. (p. 310)"

"Camels gallop by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to keep up. (p. 175)"

"It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free. (p. 35)"

"The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins.*"

"That was extremely symbolic as well, although no one could remember what of. (p. 62)"

"All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed. (p. 5)"

"His mother, as far as he could remember, had been a pleasant woman and as self-centred as a gyroscope. (p. 29)"

"No one knows the reason for all this, but it is probably quantum. (p. 3)"

"The important thing is not how many people you inhume, it's how many fail to inhume you. (pp. 20-21)"

"Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language. No, we do it for the money. And because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money. There can be few cleaner motives, shorn of all pretense.(p. 46)"

"The king looked surprised."

"The culture of the river kingdom had a lot to say about death and what happened afterward. In fact it had very little to say about life, regarding it as a sort of inconvenient prelude to the main event and something to be hurried through as politely as possible. (p. 56)"

"Whatever his eyes were focused on wasn't occupying the usual set of dimensions. (p. 65)"

"Those first pyramids had been built by human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium, who had cut rocks into pieces and then painfully put them back together again in a better shape. (p. 96)"

"A few stars had been let out early. Teppic looked up at them. Perhaps, he thought, there is life somewhere else. On the stars, maybe. If it's true that there are billions of universes stacked alongside one another, the thickness of a thought apart, then there must be people elsewhere."

"Therefore I will have dinner sent in," said the priest. "It will be roast chicken."

"Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid. (p. 135)"

"A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living."

"I hear my father-in-law's response[...] "Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

"[...] of all the world's races, our love—or rather our rapacity—for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity, yes, powers, our Progress; for ends infernal or divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my Maker cast me on the winning side."

"Books don't offer real escape but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw."

"Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history’s Horroxes, Boer-haaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this: — one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword."

"One fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction."

"People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function."

"We cut a pack of cards called historical context—our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks, and queens. Adrien's cut threes, fours, and fives. That's all."

"Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway."

"Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks war? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will… The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QES, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be."

"What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?"

"Whoever said money can't buy you happiness[...] obviously didn't have enough of the stuff."

"[...]The corporation is the future. We need to let business run the country and establish a true meritocracy." "Not choked by welfare, unions, 'affirmative action' for amputee transvestite colored homeless arachnophobes..." "A meritocracy of acumen. A culture that is not ashamed to acknowledge that wealth attracts power..." "... and that the wealthmakers—us—are rewarded. When a man aspires to power, I ask one simple question: 'Does he think like a businessman?'" Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. "I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?"

"Oh, diplomacy," said M.D., in his element, "it mops up war’s spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents."

"What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds."

"Patience's design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?"

""Now you just look here, you grebo, you can go shag your bloody sporran if you think—" One of his teeth splashed into my Kilmagoon, fifteen feet away. (I fished the tooth out to keep as proof of this unlikely claim, otherwise no one will ever believe me.)"

"We–by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just bu existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drugs barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offense is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight."

"The ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, "But it's been done a hundred times before!"—as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!"

"Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured."

"The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will."

"[...] science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction. [...] Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man , are the same faculties that'll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!"

"What you describe is beyond the... conceivable, Sonmi~451. Murdering fabricants to supply dineries with food and Soap... no. The charge is preposterous, no, it's unconscionable, no it's blasphemy! As an Archivist I can't deny that you saw what you believe you saw, but as a consumer of the corpocracy, I am impelled to say, what you saw must, must, have been a Union... set, created for your benefit. No such... "slaughtership" could possibly be permitted to xist. The Beloved Chairman would never permit it! The Juche would ionize Papa Song's entire exec strata in the Litehouse! If fabricants weren't paid for their labor in retirement communities, the whole pyramid would be... the foulest perfidy. Business is business."

"He said the giant was a deity that offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth, and perhaps the cracked stonework still possessed a lingering divinity."

"[...] in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights," the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful."

"Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities."

"A Soul's value is the dollars therein."

"Unanimity would maintain order. Enforcers aren't all Union agents. Even Yoona~939 chose death over slavery."