Discworld

"Gentlemen, no fighting please. This is, after all, a council of war. (p. 26)"

"And, of course, any citizen has the right to bear arms. Bear that in mind, please."

""Have you ever been in a pub where everyone goes armed? Oh, things are a little polite at first, I'll grant you, and then some twerp drinks out of the wrong mug or picks up someone else's change by mistake and five minutes later you're picking noses out of the beer nuts—" (p. 29)"

"It demonstrates the friendly alliance between the University and the civil government which, I may say, seems to consist of their promising to do anything we ask provided we promise not to ask them to do anything. (p. 29)"

"Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me. (p. 34)"

"After all, this was a Traditional Ceremony. If you took the view that you were not going to do things because they were apparently ridiculous, you might as well go home right now. (p. 80)"

"Vimes never quite understood how the civic leaders were chosen. They just seemed to turn up, like a tack on the sole of your shoe. (p. 84)"

""Do you need an excuse to have a war? said Nobby. I mean, who for? Can't you just say, ‘You got lots of cash and land but I've got a big sword so divvy up right now, chop chop?' That's what I'd do," said Corporal Nobbs, military strategist. "And I wouldn't even say that until after I'd attacked." (pp. 111-112)"

"Death happens to other people. The other person in this case had been him. (p. 126)"

"Ankh-Morpork no longer had a fire brigade. The citizens had a rather disturbingly direct way of thinking at times, and it did not take long for people to see the rather obvious flaw in paying a group of people by the number of fires they put out. (p. 140)"

"It wasn't far to Money Trap Lane. It was in a ghetto of what Lord Rust would probably call "skilled artisans," the people too low down the social scale to be movers and shakers but slightly too high to be easily moved or shook. (p. 146)"

"It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus. (p. 155)"

"Vimes shook his head. "That always chews me up," he said. "People killing one another just because their gods have squabbled—""

"Already old Fred's face was creasing up in the soft expression of someone who has been mugged in Memory Lane. (p. 178)"

"Colon looked awkward, as if the bunched underwear of the past was tangling itself in the crotch of recollection. (p. 179)"

"He rummaged in a pocket and produced a very small book, which he held up for inspection."

""We-ell, no point in going to war unless you're on the winning side," said Nobby, sticking the white feather in his helmet."

"One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual. (p. 184)"

"He looked at the face in the mirror. Unfortunately, it was his. (p. 185)"

""You, sir, are no gentleman," said Rust."

"He had the look of a lawnmower just after the grass had organized a workers' collective. There was a definite suggestion that, deep inside, he knew this was not really happening. It could not be happening because this sort of thing did not happen. Any contradictory evidence could be safely ignored. (p. 204)"

"And then he realized why he was thinking like this."

"It is always useful to have an enemy who is prepared to die for his country, this means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind. (p. 213)"

"History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders. (p. 223)"

"You told me I ought to listen to the voice of the people. Odd thing, ain't it...you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls."

"Theft was the only crime, whether the loot was gold, innocence, land or life. (p. 234)"

"71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn't believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren't true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed. (p. 238)"

"All this was logical. It just wasn't very comforting. (p. 241)"

"They do what they're told, they tend to believe the last thing they heard, they're not bright enough to ask questions, and they have that certain unshakeable loyalty available to those unencumbered by too much intelligence."

"Angua stopped. Of course, to the unpracticed eye all Klatchians looked alike, but then to a werewolf all humans looked alike: they looked appetizing. (p. 255)"

""Fortune favors the brave, sir," said Carrot cheerfully."

"So, Constable Visit, there's a god on our side, is there?"

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life. (p. 274)"

"Vimes prodded at it as politely as he dared, and then took the usual view that, if you can recognize at least half of it, it's probably okay to eat the rest. (pp. 285-286)"

"As they say, ‘If you would seek war, prepare for war.'"

"The night is always old. He'd walked too often down dark streets in the secret hours and felt the night stretching away, and known in his blood that while days and kings and empires come and go, the night is always the same age, always aeons deep. Terrors unfolded in the velvet shadows and while the nature of the talons may change, the nature of the beast does not. (p. 294)"

"Experience had taught him never to say things like "I don't like it, it's too quiet." There was no such thing as too quiet. (p. 312)"

"The man had a point. The man had a whole sword. (p. 362)"

"Somewhere out there was the Ankh-Morpork army, what there was of it. And somewhere waiting was the Klatchian army. And thousands of men who might have quite liked one another had they met socially would thunder toward one another and start killing, and after that first rush you had all the excuses you needed to do it again and again… (pp. 362-363)"

"I'm not a natural killer! See this? See what it says? I'm supposed to keep the peace, I am! If I kill people to do it, I'm reading the wrong manual! (p. 367)"

"For the serious empire-builder there was no such thing as a final frontier. (p. 378)"

"You can't arrest the commander of an army!"

""You are making a mockery of the whole business, Vimes!" said Lord Rust."

"The point about burning your boats is that you shouldn't be standing on them when you drop the match. (p. 390)"

"Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being reexamined and reevaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands. (p. 426)"

"Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we'd be melting the bronze already. (p. 427)"

"And, of course, very few people do know how Tradition is supposed to go. There's a certain mysterious ridiculousness about it by its very nature—once there was a reason why you had to carry a posy of primroses on Soul Cake Tuesday, but now you did it because...that's what was Done. (p. 436)"

"Besides, the intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it. (p. 436)"

"And then everyone was just running, because everyone else was running. (p. 436)"

"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of “true.” (p. 2)"