Guards! Guards!:
Overview
'They were myths and they were real,' he said loudly. 'Both a wave and a particle.'
[p. 20]
Thunder rolled...
It is said that the gods play games with the fates of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are - who knows?
Best not to speculate.
Thunder rolled...
It rolled a six.
[p. 25]
Of course, there were various groups seeking his overthrow, and this was right and proper and the sign of a vigorous and healthy society. No-one could call him unreasonable about the matter. Why, hadn't he founded most of them himself? And what was so beautiful was the way they spent nearly all their time bickering with one another.
Human nature, the Patrician always said, was a marvellous thing. Once you understood where its levers were.
[p. 85]
It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don't need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they're progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they'll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable.
[p. 108]
Knowledge equals power...
(...)
Power equals energy...
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
Energy equals matter...
(...)
Matter equals mass.
And mass distorts space. It distorts it into polyfractal L-Space.
[p. 166]
Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.
[p. 170]
'You have the right to remain silent,' he [Carrot] said. 'You have the right not to injure yourself falling down the steps on the way to the cells. You have the right not to jump out of high windows. You do not have to say anything, you see, but anything you do say, well, I have to take it down and it might be used as evidence.'
[p. 190]
You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless, and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape - the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes - we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.
[p. 228]
'I warn you, dragon, the human spirit is-'
They never found out what it was, or at least what he thought it was, although possibly in the dark hours of a sleepless night some of them might have remembered the subsequent events and formed a pretty good and gut-churning insight, to whit, that one of the things sometimes forgotten about the human spirit is that while it is, in the right conditions, noble and brave and wonderful, it is also, when you get right down to it, only human.
[p. 241]
'Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself,' said the Patrician (...). 'The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.'
[p. 257]
'Never trust a ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his heart isn't in the job.'
[p. 257, Vetinari]
But of course there were the rules. Everyone knew there were rules. They just had to hope like Hell that the gods knew the rules, too.
[p. 263]
He [Vimes]'d never felt really at home with swords, but a cleaver was a different matter. A cleaver had weight. It had purpose. A sword might have a certain nobility about it, unless it was the one belonging for example to Nobby, which relied on rust to hold it together, but what a cleaver had was a tremendous ability to cut things up.
[p. 269]
'I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,' said the man [Vetinari]. 'You are wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.'
[p. 302]