It's wild how you can read basically any Discworld book and find gems like that one. I read them as a teenager and loved them, going back to them decades later I find that there was so much wisdom in there that my teenage brain hadn't even begun to appreciate.

Guards, Guards (from 1987) is crammed with them:

> They avoided one another's faces, for fear of what they might see mirrored there. Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I'll murmur agreement, not actually say anything, I'm not stupid as that, but definitely murmur very firmly, so that the others will be in no doubt that I thoroughly disapprove, because at a time like this it behooves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard...

> No one said anything. The cowards, thought each man.

So much insight about the human condition in those books.

[delayed]

> > ...you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”

A little more highfalutin with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:

> The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/450864-the-line-separating-...

And for modern times:

* “Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”