Terry Pratchett - People Quotes

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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
Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can. People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the sequence is, first object, then belief. In fact, it works the other way.

Terry Pratchett
You are in favour of the common people? said Dragon mildly. The common people? said Vimes. They're nothing special. They're no different from the rich and powerful except they've got no money or power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit. So I suppose I've got to be on their side.

Terry Pratchett
There was a certain something about the air in the city. You got the feeling that it was air that had seen life. You couldn't help noting with every breath that thousands of other people were very close to you and nearly all of them had armpits.

Terry Pratchett
Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows — sometimes it does not need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.

Terry Pratchett
People like that don't need a reason apart from "because I can". They have a nightmare and try to make it happen.

Terry Pratchett
We're dealing here," said Vimes, "With a twisted mind." "Oh, no! You think so?" "Yes." "But... no... you can't be right. Because Nobby was with us all the time." "Not Nobby," said Vimes testily. "Whatever he might do to a dragon, I doubt if he'd make it explode. There's stranger people in this world than Corporal Nobbs, my lad." Carrot's expression slid into a rictus of intrigued horror. "Gosh," he said.

Terry Pratchett
People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.

Terry Pratchett
If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.

Terry Pratchett
Sometimes I really think people ought to have to pass a proper exam before they're allowed to be parents. Not just the practical, I mean.

Terry Pratchett
The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain -- the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn.

Terry Pratchett
It's quite easy to accidentally overhear people talking downstairs if you hold an upturned glass to the floorboards and accidentally put your ear to it.

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
London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.

Terry Pratchett
It's vital to remember who you really are. It's very important. It isn't a good idea to rely on other people or things to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong.

Terry Pratchett
People are often so busy living that they never stop to wonder why.

Terry Pratchett
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

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
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
I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people.

Terry Pratchett
And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

Terry Pratchett
Some people are confident because they are fools. Leonard had the look of someone who was confident because, so far, he'd never found a reason not to be.

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
The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves…He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian's opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be.

Terry Pratchett
People were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant.

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
It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing' people's doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.

Terry Pratchett
Personal's not the same as important. People just think it is.

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
They know that people need witches; they need the unofficial people who understand the difference between right and wrong, and when right is wrong and when wrong is right. The world needs the people who work around the edges. They need the people who can deal with the little bumps and inconveniences. And little problems. After all, we are almost all human. Almost all of the time.

Terry Pratchett