Discworld

"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)"

"It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air. (p. 36)"

"An upturned tortoise is the ninth most pathetic thing in the entire multiverse."

"Fear is a strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground. (p. 30)"

"He knew from experience that true and obvious ideas, such as the ineffable wisdom and judgment of the Great God Om, seemed so obscure to many people that you actually had to kill them before they saw the error of their ways. (pp. 26-27)"

"The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done. (p. 23)"

"The Omnians were a God-fearing people."

"Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, "It's indoor work with no heavy lifting, do you want to be a plowman like your father?" (p. 21)"

""How many talking tortoises have you met?" it said sarcastically."

"You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look. (p. 20)"

"Brutha hesitated. It dawned on him, very slowly, that demons and succubi didn't turn up looking like small old tortoises. There wouldn't be much point. Even Brother Nhumrod would have to agree that when it came to rampant eroticism, you could do a lot better than a one-eyed tortoise. (p. 18)"

"Brother Preptil, the master of the music, had described Brutha's voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey. (p. 17)"

"And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do. (p. 15)"

"You do not ask people like that what they are thinking about in case they turn around very slowly and say "You." (p. 12)"

"The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to. (p. 11)"

"No matter what your skills, there was a place for you in the Citadel."

"There was something creepy about that boy, Nhumrod thought. It was the way he looked at you when you were talking, as if he was listening. (p. 7)"

"Because what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods. (p. 7)"

"And, as is generally the case around the time a prophet is expected, the Church redoubled its efforts to be holy. This was very much like the bustle you get in any large concern when the auditors are expected, but tended towards taking people suspected of being less holy and putting them to death in a hundred ingenious ways. This is considered a reliable barometer of the state of one's piety in most of the really popular religions. There's a tendency to declare that there is more backsliding around than in the national toboggan championships, that heresy must be torn out root and branch, and even arm and leg and eye and tongue, and that it's time to wipe the slate clean. Blood is generally considered very efficient for this purpose. (p. 5)"

"And it came to pass that in that time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One:"

"Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you. (p. 3)"

"Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But history...ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just...well, things happening one after another. (p. 2)"

"Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. (p. 2)"