"There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world."

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."

"The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side."

"Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things". - Carpe Jugulum

"A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on." - The Truth

"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it." - Monstrous Regiment

"Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices." - The Wee Free Men

"Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness." - Men at Arms

"It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive." - Soul Music

"History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders." - Jingo

"Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer run even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear.'" - Snuff

"It’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved." - Snuff

"If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life." - Guards! Guards!

"That was always the dream, wasn’t it? ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now’? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp. A much better dream, one that’d ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn’t know then." - Night Watch

GNU Terry

"Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless."

"Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences."

"Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future."

"You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it."

"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."

"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat."

"For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

"To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought."

"There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain."

"We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist."

"If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude."

I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.

The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power. The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as the one who didn’t know; the active as well as the indifferent. Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened?

I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one liable: how they have tackled with the task that life has given and gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they have not done. And I feel I have the right to be inexorable and not squander my compassion, of not sharing my tears with them.

I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience. And in it, the social chain does not rest on a few; nothing of what happens in it is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the intelligent work of the citizens. Nobody in it is looking from the window of the sacrifice and the drain of a few. Alive, I am a partisan. That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.