It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.

The words echoed around the cavern and broke through mere rock, so great was the force behind them, melted mere mountains, screamed across the miles.

... a man needs no camel to ride to hell, yea, nor horse, nor mule; a man may ride into hell on his tongue...

A witch relied too much on words ever to go back on them.

WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN.

And the words people said were just shadows of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone's mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.

To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you'd turned things into stories, you could change the stories.

Lord Vetinari in a meeting: “what people said was what they wanted him to hear. He paid a lot of attention to the spaces outside the words, though. That’s where the things were that they hoped he didn’t know and didn’t want him to find out.