Men At Arms Quotes
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money."
"Take boots, for example... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
"Dwarfs make a living by smashing up rocks with valuable minerals in them and the silicon-based lifeform known as trolls are, basically, rocks with valuable minerals in them."
"In the wild they also spend most of the daylight hours dormant, and that's not a situation a rock containing valuable minerals needs to be in when there are dwarfs around."
"Dwarfs hated trolls because trolls hated dwarfs, and vice versa."
"The Patrician gets really shirty about ethnic trouble," said Sergeant Colon moodily. "He gets really sarcastic about it."
"Got a real sense o'duty, that boy," said Corporal Nobbs.
"You can't let him go out there!" said Angua. "It's certain death!"
"Carrot was not stupid. He was direct, and honest, and good-natured and honourable in all his dealings."
"If Carrot did have a minor fault, it lay in not paying attention to small details around him when his mind was on other things."
"It's cultural," said Sergeant Colon, miserably. "No sense us tryin' to force our culture on 'em, is there? That's speciesist."
"Whereas in a few days he would, as Sergeant Colon had said, be on the gravy boat."
"Come to think of it, there were always just guards at a guard's funeral."
"The point was that everyone else had someone, even if in Nobby's case it was probably against their will."
"He'd wanted to avoid that. And now Fate was handing him a fairy tale."
"It was a nice day, so he was working in the garden."
"Visitors to Ankh-Morpork were often surprised to find that there were some interesting gardens attached to the Patrician's Palace."
"He maintained the little zoo, and the racehorse stable, and even recognized that the gardens themselves were of extreme historic interest because this was so obviously the case."
"There's a certain type of person it's very hard to imprison."
"Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage," he said.
"I've been told I should try to make the occasion a little more enjoyable."
"There's something in the air in this city," he thought. "If the Creator had said, 'Let there be light' in Ankh-Morpork, he'd have got no further because of all the people saying 'What colour?'"
"You polish that up real bright!" he said. "You can see yourself in it. So can anything else!"
"It would have been better all round if he'd called the dwarf some names. It would have been better if he'd made it seem that Cuddy was worth an insult."
"‘He didn't say they've got to be able to answer them,’ said Cuddy grimly."
"Only in broad terms. Come on, let's go and have a drink…"
"No-one drinks like a copper who has seen too much to stay sober."
"‘What gets me is that he was murdered,’ said Carrot."
"‘It all works, that's the funny thing,’ said Carrot."
"‘I couldn't put you to the trouble,’ she said."
"You will cease any investigations connected with this theft from the Assassins' Guild."
"Normally it's just… well… suicide, or Guild fighting, stuff like that. But he was just a dwarf! Pillar of the community!"
"‘But they're not really… our kind of people,’ said Carrot wretchedly."
"They just disagree with other people about the position of things. Like money. He thinks it should all be in his pocket."
"We're going to find out what's been going on here."
"The river Ankh is probably the only river in the universe on which the investigators can chalk the outline of the corpse."
"Corpses in the river… well, there was nothing very unusual about that."
"The Alchemists' Guild is opposite the Gamblers' Guild. Usually. Sometimes it's above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it."
"Everyone knows trolls can't even count up to four!"
"Lightning lemons! Where's the sense in that? It was as bad as his ‘voices-in-the-sky’ machine."
"Someone like Vimes could upset things. Not because he was clever. A clever Watchman was a contradiction in terms."
"There's always a crime, if you look hard enough."
"Someone was trying to kill him, and that made him feel more alive than he had done for days."
"The city's full of people who you just see around."
"It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness."
"In Ankh-Morpork even the shit have a street to itself."
"The best weapon we can use right now is the truth."
"You couldn't be a real copper in Ankh-Morpork and stay sane. You had to care. And caring in Ankh-Morpork was like opening a tin of meat in the middle of a piranha school."
"Technically Ankh-Morpork is built on loam, but what it is mainly built on is Ankh-Morpork; it has been constructed, burned down, silted up, and rebuilt so many times that its foundations are old cellars, buried roads and the fossil bones and middens of earlier cities."
"If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done."
"Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness."
"An appointment is an engagement to see someone, while a morningstar is a large lump of metal used for viciously crushing skulls. It is important not to confuse the two."
"Big crimes and little crimes. Sometimes the little crimes look big and the big crimes you can hardly see, but the crucial thing is to decide which is which."
"Wolves didn't even have a word for wolves! It's not like that. Names are human things."
"Throw off your choke chains, he said. Bite the hand that feeds you. Rise up and howl."
"Wolves don't even have names! Why should they? They know who they are, and they know who the rest of the pack are."
"Ain't no dwarfs or trolls or humans in the Watch, see. Just Watchmen, see?"
"You learn quick. You'll go a long way in this man's army."
"After ten minutes anything's putty in them hands."
"We had to jump through hoops for that man, we hated his damn guts."
"You'd better pray Big Fido doesn't find out."
"People ought to think for themselves, Captain Vimes says. The problem is, people only think for themselves if you tell them to."
"Just for a moment, while they are near you, everyone else believes it too."
"If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat."
"A good man will kill you with hardly a word."
"Kings don't come out of nowhere, waving a sword and putting everything right."
"People should do things because an officer tells them. They shouldn't do it just because Corporal Carrot says so."
"When you need us, you really need us. And when you don't... well, best if we just walk around the streets and shout All's Well. Providing all is well, of course."