... upper class etiquette in Ankh-Morpork held that, while you could snub your friends any time you felt like it, it was the height of bad form to be impolite to your worst enemy. (NW)
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'... I'm useless. I was educated to be useless. What we've always been supposed to do is hang around until there's a war and do something really stupidly brave and then get killed. What we've mainly done is hang on to things. Ideas mostly.' (TT)
William's class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it. (TT)
In Mrs Whitlow's book, gods were socially very acceptable, at least if they had proper human heads and wore clothes ... (LC)
Lord Downey was an assassin. Or, rather, an Assassin. The capital letter was important. It separated those cuts who went around murdering people for money from the gentlemen who were occasionally consulted by other gentlemen who wished to have removed, for a consideration, any inconvenient razorblades from the candyfloss of life. (H)
'You are armigerous, Nobby.'
Bobby nodded. 'But I got a special shampoo for it, sir.' (FC) He’d faced trolls and dwarf and dragons, but now he was having to meet an entirely new species. The rich. (MA)
'I should have thought you'd be all for kings.'
'Some of them were fearful oiks, you know,' she said airily. 'Wives all over the place, and chopping people's heads off, fighting pointless wars, eating with their knife, chucking half-eaten chicken legs over their shoulders, that sort of thing. Not our sort of people at all.' (GG) People in Scoone Avenue had old money, which was supposed to be much better than new money, although Captain Vimes had never had enough of either to spot the difference. People in Scoone Avevue had their own personal bodyguards. People in Scoone Avenue were said to be so aloof they wouldn't even talk to the gods. This was a slight slander. They would talk to gods, if they were well-bred gods of decent family. (GG)
It appears to be a fact of life that if two or more well-born ladies should gather together, cupcake are essential. Otherwise the ceiling might fall on them. (SC)
There had been a sound like someone making no noise at all. Forget peas and mattresses – sheer natural selection had established over the years that the royal families that survived the longest were those whose members could distinguish an assassin in the dark by the noise he was clever enough not to make …. (M)
The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails
if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed. (M) ‘…sometimes you should follow the arrogance … You should look for those who can’t believe that the law would ever catch them, who believe that they act out of a right that the rest of us do not have. The job of the officer of the law is to let them know that they are wrong!’ (Sn)
‘Aristocrats don’t notice philosophical conundra. They just ignore them. Philosophy includes contemplating the possibility that you might be wrong, sir, and a real aristocrat knows that he is always right. It’s not vanity, you understand, it’s built-in absolute certainty. They may sometimes be as mad as a hatful of spoons, but they are always definitely and certainly mad.’ (Sn)
They all seemed to have names likes Bunny or Bubbles, they kept in touch meticulously, they’d all married influential and powerful men, they all hugged one another when they met and went on about the good old days in Form 3b or whatever, and if they acted together, they could probably run the world or, it occurred to Vimes, might already be doing so.
They were Ladies Who Organize. (Th) Sybil's female forebears had valiantly backed up their husbands as distant embassies were besieged, had given birth on a camel or in the shade of a stricken elephant, had handed around the little gold chocolates while trolls were trying to break into the compound, or had merely stayed at home and nursed such bits of husbands and sons as made it back from endless little wars. The result was a species of woman who, when duty called, turned into solid steel. (Th)
'... run away from any woman who pronounces “what” with two Hs.' (GP)
She knew about old money, which was somehow hallowed by the fact that people had hug on to it for years, and she knew about new money, which seemed to be being made by all these upstarts that were flooding into the city these days. But under her powdered bosom she was an Ankh-Morpork shopkeeper, and knew that the best kind of money was the sort that was in her hand rather than someone else’s. The best kind of money was mine, not yours. (Ma)
'Disgusting, really, her livin’ in a room like this. She’s got pots of money, sarge says, she’s got no call livin’ in ordinary rooms. What’s the good of not wanting to be poor if the rich are allowed to go round livin’ in ordinary rooms?' (GG)
'Pedigree? Pedigree? What’s a pedigree? It’s just breedin’. I had a father too, you know. And two grandads. And four great-grandads. And many of ‘em were the same dog, even.' (MP)
Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something to keep quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. (MM)
‘That’s very high-class talkin’, that is.’
‘I can hardly understand him!’ ‘Shows it’s high class, Nobby. It wouldn’t be much good if people like you could understand him, right?' (Th) Always remember that the crowd which applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show. (GP)
… those who filled the grates and dusted the furniture and swept the floors stayed on, as they had stayed on before, because they seldom paid any attention to, or possibly didn’t even know, who their lord was, and in any case were too useful and knew where the brooms were kept. Lords come and go, but dust accumulates. (NW)
He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armour. It was gilt by association. (NW)
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