"Let's call it 'quantum'" is not an explanation.
--Terry Pratchett
A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?
--Terry Pratchett
All bastards are bastards, but some bastards is bastards.
--Terry Pratchett
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
--Terry Pratchett
Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example.
--Terry Pratchett
Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.
--Terry Pratchett
Changing was necessary. Change was right. He was all in favor of change. What he was dead against was things not staying the same.
--Terry Pratchett
Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
--Terry Pratchett
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.
--Terry Pratchett
Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of them wanders into the cave and starts to purr.
--Terry Pratchett
Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
--Terry Pratchett
Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possibly go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.
--Terry Pratchett
Either all days are holy or none are.
--Terry Pratchett
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
--Terry Pratchett
Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
--Terry Pratchett
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel?
--Terry Pratchett
Experience has taught me that you feel better on a flight if you avoid chicken fat in plastic sauce.
--Terry Pratchett
Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.
--Terry Pratchett
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
--Terry Pratchett
Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
--Terry Pratchett
Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.
--Terry Pratchett
Hard to have faith, ain't it, when you read too many books.
--Terry Pratchett
History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just... well, things happening one after another.
--Terry Pratchett
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
--Terry Pratchett
I don't like the place at all. It's all wrong. An imposition on the Landscape. I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.
--Terry Pratchett
I keep vaguely wondering what Macs are like, but the ones I've seen spend too much time being friendly.
--Terry Pratchett
I wish that the people who sing about the deeds of heroes would think about the people who have to clear up after them.
--Terry Pratchett
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
--Terry Pratchett
If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.
--Terry Pratchett
If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.
--Terry Pratchett
If you watched and listened, you would see that... marriage was like a barge on the river, with the wife being the wind that told the captain which way the barge would sail.
--Terry Pratchett
Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.
--Terry Pratchett
In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
--Terry Pratchett
In fact, no gods anywhere play chess. They prefer simple, vicious games, where you 'Do Not Achieve Transcendence' but 'Go Straight to Oblivion;' a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
--Terry Pratchett
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
--Terry Pratchett
It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.
--Terry Pratchett
It's all wrong. An imposition on the landscape. I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.
--Terry Pratchett
It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing.
--Terry Pratchett
Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It's a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.
--Terry Pratchett
Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk.
--Terry Pratchett
Just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true.
--Terry Pratchett
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
--Terry Pratchett
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
--Terry Pratchett
My programming language was solder.
--Terry Pratchett
Never trust a species that grins all the time. It's up to something.
--Terry Pratchett
Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit. Gravity is easy-peasy by comparison.
--Terry Pratchett
One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
--Terry Pratchett
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
--Terry Pratchett
People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.
--Terry Pratchett
Personal isn't the same as important. People just think it is.
--Terry Pratchett
She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.
--Terry Pratchett
Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
--Terry Pratchett
Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
--Terry Pratchett
That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does a Falling Tree in the Forest Make a Sound if There's No One There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, 'Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.'
--Terry Pratchett
The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus : In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.
--Terry Pratchett
The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.
--Terry Pratchett
The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.
--Terry Pratchett
The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.
--Terry Pratchett
The New Testament is basically about what happened when God got religion.
--Terry Pratchett
The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.
--Terry Pratchett
The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
--Terry Pratchett
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
--Terry Pratchett
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
--Terry Pratchett
The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong. There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise.
--Terry Pratchett
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
--Terry Pratchett
There is a rumor going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
--Terry Pratchett
There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say 'it was god's will' when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.
--Terry Pratchett
This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.
--Terry Pratchett
Trickery is what humans are all about. They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.
--Terry Pratchett
We are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.
--Terry Pratchett
When they're standing right in front of you, kings are a kind of speech impediment.
--Terry Pratchett
Wikipedia, eh? Must be accurate, then!
--Terry Pratchett
You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.
--Terry Pratchett
Found 73 occurence(s) in 52,042 quotation(s).