Terry Pratchett - People Quotes

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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'd like to stand up for the rights of people who put everything on their burger — chutney, mustard, pickle, mustard pickle, tomato sauce... It is common knowledge in my family that I can't tell the difference between a veggie burger and a meat one, because the ratio of burger to pickles is so high.

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'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
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
Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

Terry Pratchett
Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals

Terry Pratchett
Nerds are the only people who know how to operate the video recorder.

Terry Pratchett
Some people believe that when you die, you cross the River of Death and have to pay the ferryman. People don't seem to worry about that these days. Perhaps there's a bridge now.

Terry Pratchett
People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.

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
Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.

Terry Pratchett
Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.

Terry Pratchett
They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings.
It's what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it's not been a good day, The Enemy. If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it'd save a lot of trouble later on.

Terry Pratchett
Reality is not digital, an on-off state, but analog. Something gradual. In other words, reality is a quality that things possess in the same way that they possess, say, weight. Some people are more real than others, for example. It has been estimated that there are only about five hundred real people on any given planet, which is why they keep unexpectedly running into one another all the time.

Terry Pratchett
What're quantum mechanics?" "I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.

Terry Pratchett
Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

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
A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING. People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.

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

Terry Pratchett
People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes.

Terry Pratchett
I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out.

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
I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven't heard of anyone who's got better from Alzheimer's.

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
You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs.

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
Sometimes the only thing you could do for people was to be there.

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
You get all sorts of people in the library, and the librarian gets it all...

Terry Pratchett