People said that there was one law for the rich and one law for the poor, but it wasn’t true. There was no law for those who made the law, and no law for the...

When you break rules, break ’em good and hard

Wolves hate werewolves.”What? That can’t be right! When she’s wolf-shaped she’s just like a wolf!”So? When she’s human-shaped she’s just like a human. And what’s that got to do with anything? Humans don’t like werewolves....

When he was a boy he’d read books about great military campaigns, and visited the museums and looked with patriotic pride at the paintings of famous cavalry charges, last stands and glorious victories. It had...

‘Look down, your grace,’ said Skimmer. ‘Mhm, mhm.’ Vimes realized he could feel the faintest prick of a knife blade on his stomach. ‘Look down further,’ he said. Inigo looked down. He swallowed. Vimes had...

Letters rarely got written in that mine. Work stopped and the whole clan had sat around in respectful silence as his pen scrittered across the parchment. His aunt had been sent up to Varneshi’s to...

In Ankh-Morpork you can be whoever you want to be and sometimes people laugh and sometimes they clap, and mostly and beautifully, they don’t really care.

I told her we were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs.She said there’s these hills where it’s hot and rains all the time, and in the rainforests there are...

He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spent ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work...

You can’t trample infidels when you’re a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

Humans need fantasy to be human. Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of...

Death: ‘There are better things in the world than alcohol, Albert. Albert: ‘Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.’

I commend my soul to any god that can find it.

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality...

She wore so much thick white makeup in order to conceal her naturally rosy complexion that if she turned around suddenly her face would probably end up on the back of her head.

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.

Peace?’ said Vetinari. ‘Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.

William: “I’m sure we can all pull together, sir.”Vetinari: “Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.

Sometimes the only thing you could do for people was to be there.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

If women were as good as men they’d be a lot better!

It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done.

Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.

You couldn’t say ‘I had orders.’ You couldn’t say ‘It’s not fair.’ No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. […] Not ‘Thou Shalt Not’. Say ‘I Will Not’.

It was dawning on the wizards that they were outside the University, at night and without permission, for the first time in decades. A certain suppressed excitement crackled from man to man. Any watch trained...

Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters if that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical...

I hate cats.”Death’s face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant.”I SEE,” he said. The tone suggested that death was too good...

Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

Balance. It was all about balance. That had been one of the first things that she had learned: the centre of the seesaw has neither up nor down, but upness and downness flow through it...

Vimes thought for a moment and said, ‘Well, dear, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a man with a lot of wood must be in want of a wife who can handle a great...

You have no power over us, said the Auditor. We are notalive.BUT YOU ARE DEMONSTRATING ARROGANCE, PRIDE AND STUPIDITY. THESE ARE EMOTIONS. I WOULD SAY THEY ARE SIGNS OF LIFE.”Excuse me?” said the shining figure...

He’s a bit set in his ways. Congealed, I should think.

She told me that if magic gives people what they want, then not using magic can give them what they need.

The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.

Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe. There’d be a sight more frogs in this world if I didn’t know how not to turn people...

The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe.

Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant idiot.’

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain...

When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth.

The reaper does not listen to the harvest.

Your wife is a big hippo! My face is melting! My face is meltinnnnggg!

To be frank, I find religion rather offensive.

Genua had once controlled the rivermouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn’t be called piracybecause it was done by the city government, and therefore sound economicsand perfectly all right

But this didn’t feel like magic. It felt a lot older than that. It felt like music.

Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewelry into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice...

It was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying.

Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.

The land around Ankh-Morpork is fertile and largely given over to the cabbage fields that help to give the city its distinctive odor.The gray light of pre-dawn unrolled over the blue-green expanse, and around a...

That’s No’-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock, mistress,’ said Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock. ‘Ye were one jock short,’ he added helpfully.