"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
"The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it."
"It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."
"It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country," he read. "This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind."
"It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus."
"Men marched away, Vimes. And men marched back. How glorious the battles would have been that they never had to fight!"
"Are we entirely ready, sir?" said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means "We are not entirely ready, sir.""We had better be. Glory awaits, gentlemen. In the words of General Tacticus, 'let us take history by the scrotum.' Of course, he was not a very honourable fighter."
"History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders."
"Were you proposing to shoot these people in cold blood, sergeant?""Nossir. Just a warning shot inna head, sir."
"Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands."