“Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.”

“The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enqui...”

“Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.”

“I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.”

“The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.”

“Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”

“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...”

“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.”