Feet of Clay

Smite-The-Unbeliever-With-Cunning-Arguments, ringing doorbells and causing people to hide behind the furniture everywhere in the city.

* Detritus was particularly good when it came to asking questions. He had three basic ones. They were the direct (“Did you do it?”), the persistent (“Are you sure it wasn’t you that done it?”) and the subtle (“It was you what done it, wasn’t it?). Although they were not the most cunning questions ever devised, Detritus’s talent was to go on patiently asking them for hours on end, until he got the right answer, which was generally something like: “Yes! Yes! I did it! I did it! Now please tell me what it was I did!”

* It is a pervasive and beguiling myth that the people who design instruments of death end up being killed by them. There is almost no foundation in fact. Colonel Shrapnel wasn’t blown up, M. Guillotin died with his head on, Colonel Gatling wasn’t shot. If it hadn’t been for the murder of cosh and blackjack maker Sir William Blunt-Instrument in an alleyway, the rumor would never have got started.

* Welcome, Corporal Smallbottom! This is Constable Angua…Angua, show Smallbottom how well you’re learning dwarfish…”

* The Ankh-Morpork view of crime and punishment was that the penalty for the first offense should prevent the possibility of a second offense.

* This always happens in any police chase anywhere . A heavily laden lorry will always pull out of a side alley in front of the pursuit. If vehicles aren’t involved, then it’ll be a man with a rack of garments. Or two men with a large sheet of glass. There’s probably some kind of secret society behind all this.

* And for the most part were unconcerned about matters of height. There’s a dwarfish saying: “All trees are felled at ground-level”—although this is said to be an excessively bowdlerized translation for a saw which more literally means, “When his hands are higher than your head, his groin is level with your teeth.”

* These terms are often synonymous.

* As they were euphemistically named. People said, “They call themselves seamstresses—hem, hem!”

* Because of the huge obtrusive mass of his forehead, Rogers the bulls’ view of the universe was from two eyes each with their own non-overlapping hemispherical view of the world. Since there were two separate visions, Rogers had reasoned, that meant there must be two bulls (bulls not having been bred for much deductive reasoning). Most bulls believe this, which is why they always keep turning their head this way and that when they look at you. They do this because both of them want to see.