A horse's skull always looks scary, even if someone has put lipstick on it.

Certainly the Americans want to buy rights, but have no idea what to do with them.

Sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.

At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.

Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.

And what had he wanted? He'd never sat down to think about it. But mostly, he wanted yesterday to be different from today.

You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape – the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes – we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.