Terry Pratchett Quotes

756 Sourced Quotes

IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather.
THEY'RE NOT
MEANT
TO BE SAFE.

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
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
It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.

Terry Pratchett
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

Terry Pratchett
He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like "core values" at him with impunity.

Terry Pratchett
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.

Terry Pratchett
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.

Terry Pratchett
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye.

Terry Pratchett
The thing with crowns is, it isn't the putting them on that's the problem, it's the taking them off.

Terry Pratchett
Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course.

Terry Pratchett
Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth.

Terry Pratchett
When they're standing right in front of you, kings are a kind of speech impediment.

Terry Pratchett
History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles.

Terry Pratchett
The universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

Terry Pratchett
He hated games they made the world look too simple. Chess, in particular, had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the king lounged about doing nothing. If only the pawns would've united... the whole board could've been a republic in about a dozen moves.

Terry Pratchett
But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.

Terry Pratchett
It was written in some holy book, apparently, so that made it okay, and probably compulsory.

Terry Pratchett
Not for the first time in the history of the universe, someone for whom communication normally came as effortlessly as a dream was stuck for inspiration when faced with a few lines on the back of a card.

Terry Pratchett
Oh dear, I'm feeling political today. It's just that it's dawned on me that 'zero tolerance' only seems to mean putting extra police in poor, run-down areas, and not in the Stock Exchange.

Terry Pratchett
There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesn't rule the world. They're called Witches and Wizards.

Terry Pratchett
History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

Terry Pratchett
Granny Weatherwax was not lost. She wasn't the kind of person who ever became lost. It was just that, at the moment, while she knew exactly where SHE was, she didn't know the position of anywhere else.

Terry Pratchett
As for The Mapp... I suspect it'll never get a US publication. It seemed to frighten US publishers. They don't seem to understand it.
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans:
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?
I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.

Terry Pratchett
If cats looked like frogs we'd realise what nasty cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.

Terry Pratchett