"What do we do now, Nobby?" "Arrest the suspect, sarge," said Corporal Nobbs, saluting smartly. "What suspect, Nobby?" "Him," said Nobby, prodding the corpse with his boot. "I call it highly suspicious, being dead like that." "But he's the victim, Nobby. He was the one what was killed." "Ah, right. So we can get him as an accessory, too." "Nobby—" "He's been drinking, too. We could do him for being dead and disorderly."

"Sad to say, but I’ve come to the conclusion that if you keep turning the other cheek they’ll go on slapping you in the face. (p. 288)"

"“I have to ask, sir...Why does it have to be done like this?” Vetinari smiled. “Can you keep a secret, Mister Lipwig?” “Oh, yes, sir. I’ve kept lots.” “Capital. And the point is, so can I. You do not need to know.” (p. 201)"

"“We can’t just drop everything, sir!” “Mister Lipwig. Is there something in the word tyrant you do not understand?” (p. 201)"

"Moist was not going to be intimidated by a bunch of small people who were giving themselves airs. He was never one for protocol—it got in the way and often concealed nasty and dangerous things. (p. 247)"

"It appears, Mister Lipwig, that you do not understand the nature of our relationship. I ask, very politely, for you to achieve something, bearing in mind that there are other ways I could ask, and it is your job to get things done. (p. 200)"

"A dwarf who had been silent during the conclave in the cavern was remembering the old Djelibeybi legend about the way to get an ass down from the minaret, and of course the answer was you first have to teach it not to be an ass. But in what world could that ever happen when you’re dealing with grags? (p. 194)"

"The terrible fact was that when dwarfs schism, they schism…every deviation from the norm was treated as an attack on all that was truly dwarfish. (p. 195)"

"Moist gave up. Too much traveling on the railway could turn you into a philosopher, although, he conceded, not a very good one. (p. 280)"

"In the trouble with madness was that the mad didn’t know they were mad. The grags came down heavily on those who did not conform and seemed not to realize that this was like stamping potatoes into the mud to stop them growing. (p. 195)"

"The smile Mr. de Worde gave as he stepped from the platform on to the footplate cemented this moment onto the front page, assuming this journey was a success—although you had to be aware that it would also make the front page if the engine blew up. Journalism was, well, after all, journalism. (p. 113)"

"We are not difficult people, but the government drags its feet when it comes to cleaning out ze bandits, because, as you understand, bandits and governments ’ave so much in common that they might be interchangeable anywhere in the world…I see you smiling, Mr. Lipwig. Is something amusing? (p. 139)"

"Dick just loved talking about Iron Girder and everything else to do with locomotion, but he was a straightforward man and the press of the Sto Plains could eat up for lunch straightforward man if he wasn’t careful. Moist, on the other hand, in the vicinity of the press, was as straightforward as a sackful of kaleidoscopes. (p. 110)"

"Moist was, by inclination, a stranger to the concept of two in the morning, a time that happened to other people. (p. 187)"

"Now I know you saw something, sir," he said. "You were there." said Death. "You see, sir," said Corporal Carrot, "as I understand the law, you are an Accessory After the Fact. Or possibly Before the Fact."

"As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and neccesary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored."

"A kind of ratchet formed in people’s minds: here is the new thing and here it is. And yesterday you never thought about it and after today you don’t know what you would do without it. That was what the technology was doing. It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round. (p. 281)"

"“Thank you Mr. Forefather. Pretty soon there’ll be a lot of journalists coming to see all this and I’m sorry about that, but they turn up like flies.” “That’s all right, sir. Good for business. Journalists drink twice as much as anyone else and for twice as long.” (p. 191)"

"“How could you have foreseen it?” “Well, madam, Diamond King of Trolls asked me the very same thing, but all I can say is that it lies in the indefatigable nature of sapient creatures. In short, they can’t all be satisfied at the same time.” (p. 11)"

"After all, if you can’t trust governments, whom can you trust? (p. 56)"

"Vetinari sighed and continued, “Though of course I do not imagine it is in my remit to monitor the private doings of my people.” “My Lord,” interjected Drumknott. ”As a tyrant that is, in fact, exactly what you do.” (p. 63)"

"He reflected that, from a distance, the world might conceivably look to be at peace, a state of affairs that always ends in war, eventually. (p. 9)"

"The law is there for the people, rather than the other way round. (p. 446)"

"Can I make one thing perfectly clear, your grace, the law cannot act retrospectively. If it did, none of us would be safe. (p. 460)"

"“Young dwarfs, badly advised. They should have known better.” The silence enveloped Lord Vetinari. “Indeed,” said his lordship, “but it is easy to be an idiot when you are seventeen and I would warrant that the grags who put them up to it are much older. There is no sense in breaking the arrow if, by acting sensibly, you may capture the archer.” (p. 68)"

"It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it. (p. 1)"

"But I’ll say this for the old bastard: he is honorable, honest and straightforward. It’s a shame that he is also pigheaded, stupid, and incompetent. (p. 420)"

"When you aren’t expecting it, that’s when you should expect it! (p. 428)"

"You’re just a bully who found it easier and easier and decided that everybody else wasn’t really a real person, not like you, and when you know that, there’s no crime too big, is there? No crime you won’t do. (p. 432)"

"They think that I’m like them! I hate that! They just don’t get it! They’ve got on well for years without ever having to think differently, and now they don’t know how! (p. 419)"

"But sometimes you should follow the arrogance…You should look for those who can’t believe that the law would ever catch them, who believe that they act out of a right that the rest of us do not have. The job of the officer of the law is to let them know that they are wrong! (p. 403)"

"Woman’s logic, Sam thought: everything is going to be all right because it ought to be all right. The trouble is, reality is never as simple as that and doesn’t allow for paperwork. (p. 437)"

"The aristocrats, if such they could be called, generally hated the whole concept of the train on the basis that it would encourage the lower classes to move about and not always be available. (p. 89)"

"He was eating a roasted rabbit like there was no tomorrow—which clearly had been the case for the rabbit. (p. 417)"

"Good old tobacco, nothing harmful about tobacco, and smuggling it was, well, it was really like a game, everybody knew that. Nothing wrong with outsmarting the revenue, that’s what the revenue was for! Vimes thought, isn’t that how I’ve always said it worked? Little crimes breeding big crimes. You smile at little crimes and then big crimes blow your head off. (p. 270)"

"He was a scalawag, a chancer, a ruthless fighter and a dangerous driver of bargains over the speed limit. Since all this was a bit of a mouthful, he was referred to as a successful businessman, since that more or less amounted to the same thing. (p. 277)"

"As for the law, don’t try to talk to me about the law. I am not above the law, but I stand right underneath it, and I hold it up!…Justice, not convenience, will be served. (p. 303; ellipsis represents a brief elision for the sake of continuity)"

"It always embarrassed Samuel Vimes when civilians tried to speak to him in what they thought was “policeman.” If it came to that, he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers. (pp. 244-245)"

"Good people have no business being so bad. Goodness is about what you do. Not what you pray to. (p. 220)"

"“One day I thought, ‘How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be and, the and I and it, and so on, and there’s a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you.’ That was fifty-seven books ago. It seems to have worked.” (p. 220)"

"Vetinari always said, “What is normal? Normal is yesterday and last week and last month taken together.” (p. 311)"

"There were times when the world did not need policemen, because what it really did need was for somebody who knew what they were doing to shut it all down and start it all up again so that this time it could be done properly… (p. 234)"

"Where there are little crimes, large crimes are not far behind. (p. 200)"

"“The son? The criminal?” “I believe, Sam, that the word is entrepreneur.” (p. 212)"

"Oh dear, you of all people must recognize a substition when you’re possessed by it? It’s the opposite of a superstition: it’s real even if you don’t believe in it. (p. 217)"

"He smiled to himself. Maybe the goblins weren’t all that stupid, only more stupid than humans were, which, when you came to think about it, took some effort. (p. 187)"

"He was bewildered. This didn’t matter very much; bewilderment was often a copper’s lot. His job was to make sense of the world, and there were times that he wished the world would meet him halfway. (p. 396)"

"I know that monks have been carefully shepherding the world, but I rather think they don’t realize that the sheep sometimes have better ideas. (p. 102)"