First the dwarfs had come...They'd been insulted because of their diligence and because of their height, but they had kept their heads down* and prospered.
[ *footnote: which was not hard, as unkind people pointed out.]

Mister Vimes liked to refer to himself as a simple copper, just as Harry King thought of himself as a rough diamond. William suspected that the world was littered with the remains of those people who had taken them at their word.

William therefore felt predisposed to like Vimes, if only because of the type of enemies he made, but as far as he could see everything about the man could be prefaced by the word 'badly', as in -spoken, -educated and -in need of a drink. ... You could add -dressed to Vimes' list.

A miscreant stole $2200 worth of silver from H.Hogland and Son, Jewllrs., of Nonsuch Street yesterday pm. Mr Hogland, (32) who was threatened at knifepoint, told the Times: 'I shall recognise the man if I should see him again because not many people have a stocking on their head.'

"I have nothing to offer you except thanks, which of course are notorious for their evaporative tendencies."
Vetinari, the politicians' politician.

"The young man is an idealist. He has yet to find out that what's in the public interest is not what the public is interested in."
Lord Vetinari's first rule of journalism.

Of course, many people in the universe have also had the misplaced belief that they can safely ignore gravity, mostly after taking some local equivalent of dried frog pills, and this has led to much extra work for elementary physics and caused brief traffic jams in the street below.

The problem, of course, was the frogs. Not rains of frogs, which were uncommon now in Ankh-Morpork, but specifically foreign treefrogs from the humid jungles of Klatch. They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted.

But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.

Dr Dodgast (132) says the winter is worse than the one in 1902 when the wolves invaded the city. He added '...and we were glad of that, because we hadn't seen fresh meat for a fortnight.'

A life of steak tartare wasn't too bad if you compared it with a death of stake au naturelle.
The tribulations of life as a vampire...

On any map of thaumic pollution, the unreal estate would be the centre of some extremely concentric circles. Already the grass was multi-coloured and some of the trees had walked away.
The unreal estate is, of course, adjacent to UU.

A military career somewhere was unlikely. William had a rooted objection to killing people he didn't know.
A disappointment to his parents and his class....

...Lies could run around the world before truth could get its boots on.

"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions." He smiled, "It's the only way to make progress. That and, of course, moving with the times."
Vertinari, of course...

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!'

"Things that are back to front are often easier to comprehend if they are upside down as well," said Lord Vetinari, tapping his chin with the silver knob of his cane in an absent-minded way. "In life as in politics."

It was a traditional dwarf axe. One side was a pickaxe, for the extraction of interesting minerals, and the other side was a war axe, because the people who own the land with the valuable minerals in it can be so unreasonable sometimes.

And thus the University got the active ingredient which it made up into pills and fed to the Bursar, to keep him sane. At least, apparently sane, because nothing was that simple at good old UU. In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane.
[ footnote: This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.]

“And my name is Dr. A.A. Dinwiddie, D.M.(7th), D.Thau., B.Occ., M.Coll., B.F. That’s Dinwiddie with an o.”
So the Bursar is feeling better now, thank you....

“And now I must fly,” said the Bursar. “Except that I musn’t.”
See!

"What was it you did to Sergeant Detritus?"
"I only wrote down what he said, sir."
"Aha, pulled a pen on him, eh?"
"Sir?"
"Writing things down at people? Tch, tch ... that sort of thing only causes trouble."
Vimes' insight can be disconcerting at times...

William stepped forward at a healthy fraction of the speed of terror.

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Bill's reach has apparently extended far....

"The right of free speech is a fine old Ankh-Morpork tradition."
"Good heavens, is it?"
"Yes, my lord."
"How did that one survive?"

The Bursar tried to look the young dwarf sternly up and down, although this was a pretty pointless intimidatory tactic to use on dwarfs since they have very little up to look down from.

"We have currently very good relationships with the dwarf communities in Copperhead and Uberwald. In dealings with the dwarfs I have seen to it that the city’s hand of friendship is permanently outstretched in a slightly downward direction."
Vetinari has a beautiful way with words...

"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.
Another fine example from Lord Vetinari.

The gnomes had integrated quickly, despite a bad start, because they were tough and even more dangerous to cross than a troll; at least a troll couldn't run up your trouser leg.
Race relations in Ankh-Morpork.

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