Terry Pratchett Quotes

It was a fine summer morning, the kind to make a man happy to be alive. And probably the man *would* have been happier to be alive. He was, in fact, dead. It would be hard to be deader without special training.

~ Terry Pratchett

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

~ Terry Pratchett

People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

~ Terry Pratchett

It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was succesfully demonstrated to be made up of /resons/ (Lit.: 'Thing-ies') or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five 'flavours', known as 'up', 'down', 'sideways', 'sex appeal' and 'peppermint'.

~ Terry Pratchett

It was a large room, heavily outfitted with the usual badly ventilated furnaces, rows of bubbling crucibles, and one stuffed alligator. Things floated in jars. The air smelled of a limited life expectancy.

~ Terry Pratchett

How can anyone trust scientists? If new evidence comes along, they change their minds.

~ Terry Pratchett

And although the space they occupy isn’t like normalspace, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of atail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings andyour eyeballs eventually realize that the space between eachdragon is, in fact, another dragon.

~ Terry Pratchett

Did I see them waving?' said Mrs Liberty'And particling, I shouldn't wonder' said the Alderman

~ Terry Pratchett

If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.

~ Terry Pratchett

It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

~ Terry Pratchett

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.Someone had stolen a book.

~ Terry Pratchett

He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.

~ Terry Pratchett

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.

~ Terry Pratchett

Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.

~ Terry Pratchett

A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.

~ Terry Pratchett

A stink. A stench. A foulness in her mind, dreadful and unforgiving. A compost of horrible ideas and rotted thoughts that made her want to take our her brain and wash it.

~ Terry Pratchett

The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.

~ Terry Pratchett

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.

~ Terry Pratchett

Oh. I see. People don't want to see what can't possibly exist.

~ Terry Pratchett

Polly felt questing eyes boring into her. She was embarrassed, of course. But not for the obvious reason. It was for the other one, the little lesson that life sometimes rams home with a stick: you are not the only one watching the world. Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you.

~ Terry Pratchett

History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

~ Terry Pratchett

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.

~ Terry Pratchett

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

~ Terry Pratchett

Peace?' said Vetinari. 'Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.

~ Terry Pratchett

It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.

~ Terry Pratchett

Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust Mothers of Borogravia! and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust?Very nearly everyone, come to think of it...

~ Terry Pratchett

Men marched away, Vimes. And men marched back. How glorious the battles would have been that they never had to fight!

~ Terry Pratchett

Are we entirely ready, sir? said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means We are not entirely ready, sir.We had better be. Glory awaits, gentlemen. In the words of General Tacticus, 'let us take history by the scrotum.' Of course, he was not a very honourable fighter.

~ Terry Pratchett

And now I demand that you do what the ignorant might feel is the easier thing. You must refrain from dying in battle. Revenge is not redress. Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards. The dead are not your masters.

~ Terry Pratchett

Now we have travelled a hundred million steps from the Datum, we are finding life systems entirely unlike our own - and yet we still find war. Must it always be so?

~ Terry Pratchett

History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that 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.

~ Terry Pratchett

There is always a choice. You mean I could choose certain death? A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.

~ Terry Pratchett

William: I'm sure we can all pull together, sir.Vetinari: Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.

~ Terry Pratchett

He said to people: you’re free. And they said hooray, and then he showed them what freedom costs and they called him a tyrant and, as soon as he’d been betrayed, they milled around a bit like barn-bred chickens who’ve seen the big world outside for the first time, and then they went back into the warm and shut the door...

~ Terry Pratchett

But...well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg.

~ Terry Pratchett

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...

~ Terry Pratchett

The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog's wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It's like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.

~ Terry Pratchett

There was this about vampires : they could never look scruffy. Instead, they were... what was the word... deshabille. It meant untidy, but with bags and bags of style.

~ Terry Pratchett

If I were you, I'd sue my face for slander.

~ Terry Pratchett

Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

~ Terry Pratchett