Farnham Calkins’s Reviews > Men at Arms > Status Update

"Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness"

"The Guard seldom drank in Ankh-Morpork's more cheerful taverns when they were off duty. It was too easy to see something there that would put them back on the duty again. Suicide, for example. Murder was fairly uncommon in Ankh-Morpork but there were a lot of suicides, too. Walking nighttime in The Shades was suicide. Saying "got rocks in your head?" to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily."

"A great many rulers, good and bad and quite often dead, know what happened; a rare few actually manage, by dint of much effort, to know what's happening. Lord Vetinari considered both types to lack ambition."

"People couldn't hear Gaspode speak because dogs don't speak. It's a well-known fact. Like a lot of other well-known facts, it overrule the observations of the senses. This is because if people went around noticing everything that was going on all the time, no one would ever get anything done. Besides, almost all dogs don't talk. Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored."