Terry Pratchett Quotes

Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.

The man gave a shrug which indicated that, although the world did indeed have many problems, this was one of them that was not his.

The jurisdiction of a good man extends to the end of the world.

She was, in fact, quite a pleasant looking girl, even if her bosom had clearly been intended for a girl two feet taller; but she was not Her. The Egregious Professor of Grammar and Usage would have corrected this to "she was not she," which would have caused the Professor of Logic to spit out his drink.

When you break rules, break 'em good and hard

Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

A Duke couldn't have the arse hanging out of his trousers when meeting foreign diplomats. Actually even plain old Sam Vimes never had the arse hanging out of his trousers, either, but no one would have actually started a war if he had.

Oh, where are my manners? Do sit down. Pull up a small child.

It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.

I express preference for a chronological sequence of events which precludes a violence.

The second mouse gets the cheese!

And we don't often get any wading birds in the River Ankh, mainly because the pollution would eat their legs away and anyway, it's easier for them to walk on the surface.

I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?" Death thought about it. CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.

I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, "If wet, in the library." Who could say that this is bad?

Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

On the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists.

It's still magic even if you know how it's done.

You have reached the end of cake

Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village-the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.

Little crimes breed big crimes. You smile at little crimes and then big crimes blow your head off.

"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."

Around it are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilised world ie, a world that can support historians

In fact, very few people on the face of the planet know that the very shape of the M25 forms the sigil *odegra* in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, and means 'Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds'.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?

Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go.

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

You can think and you can fight, but the world's always movin', and if you wanna stay ahead you gotta dance.

Any true wizard, faced with a sign like 'Do not open this door. Really. We mean it. We're not kidding. Opening this door will mean the end of the universe,' would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss is about. This made signs rather a waste of time, but at least it meant that when you handed what was left of the wizard to his grieving relatives you could say, as they grasped the jar, 'We told him not to."

There have been better attempts at marching, and they have been made by penguins.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.

In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.

He was, he would be the first to admit, a coward, an incompetent, and not even very good at being a failure.

Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you’re going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he’ll grow up to be a demon just because his dad became one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me.

So let's not get frightened when the children read fantasy. It's the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulate s the inquisitive nodes, and there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same reasons.

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

It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks.

One day I'll work out what it is you are saying, my lad, and then you'll be in trouble.

If women were as good as men they'd be a lot better!

I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.

This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate . . .)

A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

When people say "clearly" something that means there's a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren't clear at all.