“Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.”

“Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.”

“Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.”

“Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.”

“Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.”

“We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.”

“Don't be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.”

“Tolerance! The virtue that makes one bite his tongue so that he can tear out his hair.”

“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,Is the immediate jewel of their souls:Who steals my purse steals trash; tis something, nothing;twas mine, tis his, and has been slave to thousands;But he th...”

“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...”

“A historian tries to understand what happened, why it happened, what was the context, who did what, and what assumptions led them to act as they did. A historian customarily displays a certain diff...”

“Even so, I think historians have more to offer than perspective on our present woes. The foreign country we call the past also lets us look beyond the horizons of what is, to see what could be.”

“Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart.”

“Memories of lost love they do enpain,Fleeting images of what once was never again to gain.Hold tight those memories that slip through the mind, To walk in those fields again with hera dream divi...”

“As she left the cold arena Angel had to laugh,Beaten by that of a wisp girl and her subliming cunning craft.Jove lay silent in his orbit; brooding, deep, dreamless forweep,And faithful dog Sirius r...”