It'd be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went around trusting one another. (GO)
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‘There was sunnink I got to tell you. What was it, now? Oh, yeah. I remember. Your girlfriend is an agent of demonic powers.’ (MP)
He had the kind of subjects who used the words ‘find out’ when they meant ‘ascertain’. Damnation was too good for them. (E)
Hell needed horribly bright, self-centred people like Eric. They were much better at being nasty than demons could ever manage. (E)
Demons were like genies and philosophy professors – if you didn’t word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers. (WS)
'I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult," said Granny firmly. ‘Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.’
‘But all them things exist,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.' (LL) ... he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and they devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. (GO) Rincewind stared, and knew that there were far worse things than Evil. All the demons of Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely because they valued souls very highly; evil would always try to steal the universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the grey world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn’t even notice them. (LF)
But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly is was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example, of value-added tax. Or Manchester.
He'd been particularly pleased with Manchester. (GO) Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A. (GO)
'There’s no’ a lot o’ laughs in the underworld. This one used tae be called Limbo, ye ken, cuz the door was verrae low.' (W)
Most gods were people-shaped; people don’t have much imagination, on the whole. Even Offler the Crocodile God was only crocodile-headed. Ask people to imagine an animal god and they will, basically, come up with the idea of someone in a really bad mask. Men have been much better at inventing demons, which is why there are so many. (LH)
Hell, it has been suggested, is other people.
This has always come as a bit of a surprise to many demons, who had always thought that hell was sticking sharp things into people and pushing them into lakes of blood and so on. (E) Demons have existed on the Discworld for at least as long as the gods, who in many ways they closely resemble. The difference is basically the same as that between terrorists and freedom fighters. (E)
... any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realise that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake. (E)
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