"Going into land management was just about acceptable, but it seemed to William that land managed itself pretty well, on the whole. He was all in favor of the countryside, provided that it was on the other side of a window. (p. 23)"

"“But we’re a university! We have to have a library!” said Ridcully. “It adds tone. What sort of people would we be if we didn’t go into the Library?” ”Students,” said Senior Wrangler morosely. (p. 22)"

"Charity ain't giving people what you wants to give, it's giving people what they need to get. (p. 207)"

"If anyone was thinking about making a mistake, you know, like maybe sending the guards down here tomorrow, tipping the old man out of his hovel, chuckin' him in prison, anything like that...werrlll...that's the kind of mistake he ought to treasure on account of it being the last mistake he'll ever make. A word to the wise men, right? (p. 207)"

"It was so easy to slip into immortality, to ride the horse, to know everything. And every time you did, it brought closer the day when you could never get off and never forget."

"There are those who believe knowledge is something that is acquired—a precious ore hacked, as it were, from the gray strata of ignorance."

"It was a sore point. Like most people with no grasp whatsoever of real economics, Mustrum Ridcully equated "proper financial control" with the counting of paper clips. Even senior wizards had to produce a pencil stub to him before they were allowed a new one out of the locked cupboard below his desk. (p. 181)"

"—what's this Anthropomorphic Personification, then?"

"Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn’t have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you’d started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line. (pp. 32-33)"

"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time. (p. 172)"

"While evidence says that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, they're probably all on first steps. (p. 160)"

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who’s been pinching my beer? And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye. (p. 21)"

"Right now, the light at the end of his mental tunnel showed only more tunnel. (p. 152)"

"A military career somewhere was unlikely. William had a rooted objection to killing people he didn’t know. (p. 23)"

"I remember my father tellin' me some valuable advice about drinks," said Ridcully. "He said, 'Son, never drink any drink with a paper umbrella in it, never drink any drink with a humorous name, and never drink any drink that changes color when the last ingredient goes in. And never, ever, do this—'"

"Then the Dean repeated the mantra that has had such a marked effect on the progress of knowledge through the ages."

"Elsewhere, someone might have said, “It’s just books! Books aren’t dangerous!” But even ordinary books are dangerous, and not only the ones like Make Gelignite the Professional Way. A man sits in some museum somewhere and writes a harmless book about political economy and suddenly thousands of people who haven’t even read it are dying because the ones who did haven’t got the joke. Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber. (p. 21)"

"said the Hogfather."

"So mistletoe, in fact, symbolizes mistletoe?"

"Who are you?"

"Was the Hogfather a god? Why not? thought Susan. There were sacrifices, after all. All that sherry and pork pie. And he made commandments and rewarded the good and he knew what you were doing. If you believed, nice things happened to you. Sometimes you found him in a grotto, and sometimes he was up there in the sky... (pp. 125-126)"

"Anyway, then later on it sinks to the level of religion and then they start this business where some poor bugger finds a special bean in his tucker, oho, everyone say, you're king, mate, and he thinks "This is a bit of all right" only they don't say it wouldn't be a good idea to start any long books, 'cos next thing he's legging it over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasing him with holy sickles so's the earth'll come to life again and all this snow'll go away. Very, you know...ethnic. Then some bright spark thought, hey, looks like that damn sun comes up anyway, so how come we're giving those druids all this free grub? Next thing you know, there's a job vacancy. That's the thing about gods. They'll always find a way to, you know...hang on.""

""It's all done by magic, Archchancellor," he said, giving up."

"Many people are aware of the Weak and Strong Anthropic principles. The Weak One says, basically, that is was jolly amazing of the universe to be constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point where they make a living in, for example, universities, while the Strong One says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that humans should not only work in universities but also write for huge sums books with words like "Cosmic" and "Chaos" in the titles.†"

"In fact she moved with more than dignity, which is something that is given away free with kings and bishops; what she had was respectability, which is homemade out of cast iron. (p. 70)"

"You can't give her that!" she screamed. "It's not safe!"

"The house even imitated human houses. Death had created a bedroom for himself, despite the fact that he never slept. If he really picked things up from humans, had he tried insanity? It was very popular, after all. (p. 91)"

"Susan had never been able to see the attraction in cats. They were owned by the kind of people who liked puddings. There were actual people in the world whose idea of heaven would be a chocolate cat. (p. 89)"

"The old woman was a regular in Biers for the company and was quite gaga, and one of the symptoms of those going completely yo-yo was that they broke out in chronic cats. (p. 89)"

"“I think there may be one or two steps in your logic that I have failed to grasp, Mister Stibbons,” said the Archchancellor coldly. “I suppose you’re not intending to shoot your own grandfather, by any chance?” “Of course not!” snapped Ponder, “I don’t even know what he looked like. He died before I was born.” “Ah-hah!” (p. 130)"

"There was a cat-flap in the door."

"And Susan was bright enough to know that the phrase "Someone ought to do something" was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider "and that someone is me." But someone ought to do something, and right now the whole pool of someones consisted of her, and no one else. (p. 85)"

"Rage overtook Susan's curiosity. It had to travel quite fast. (p. 81)"

""Willow bark," said the Bursar."

"I thought you said people see what they expect to see."

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

"Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them. (p. 47)"

"The path to wisdom does, in fact, begin with a single step."

"This one's mental."

"That's ridiculous, boy!" said the Dean. "Idiocy is not a communicable disease."

"It wasn't even a bar. It was just a room where people drank while they waited for other people with whom they had business. The business usually involved the transfer of ownership of something from one person to another, but then, what business doesn't? (p. 26)"

"+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++ (p. 175)"

""Look at it this way, then," she said, and took a deep mental breath. "Wherever people are obtuse and absurd...and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach...and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the realities of the physical universe as an oyster has of mountaineering...yes, Twyla: there is a Hogfather. (pp. 25-26)"

"“And these are your reasons, my lord?” “Do you think I have others?” said Lord Vetinari. “My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.” Hughnon reflected that “entirely transparent” meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all. (p. 31)"

"She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do. And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella. (p. 24)"

"It was amazing how many people spent their whole lives in places where they never intended to stay. (p. 199)"

"Education had been easy."

"Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds. I can see you’ve got the hang of it already. (p. 79)"

"I think we need to know something about you."

"She shook her head. However far you ran away, you always caught yourself up. (p. 5)"