Terry Pratchett People Quotations

It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.

Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people's memories for a while.

It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.

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.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

Humans need fantasy to be human. Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged:Yes. But people have got to believe that or what's the point?My point exactly.

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.

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

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

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.

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.

People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

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.

It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.

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

All I am really promoting in the books is the Golden Rule, which I hope everybody knows to be "do as you would be done by." It has one or 2 flaws, but it is a good soundbite. Evil starts when you treat other people as things. There are perhaps worse crimes, but they begin when you treat other people as things.

My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.

Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

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

I tell you, commander, it's true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.

People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.

A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.

Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.

You're allowed to grant people into the darkness, but you must allow them to come out again.

The best research you can do is to talk to people.

Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.

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.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

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

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.

Granny Weatherwax was not a good loser. From her point of view, losing was something that happened to other people.

The people who guard the rainbow don't like those who get in the way of the sun.

He'd been an angel once. He hadn't meant to Fall. He'd just hung around with the wrong people.

It's always surprising to be reminded that while you're watching and thinking about people, all knowing and superior, they're watching and thinking about you, right back at you.

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.

...and the funny thing was that people who weren't entirely certain they were right always argued much louder than other people, as if the main person they were trying to convince were themselves.

There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

One person is nothing. Two people are a nation.

History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it

It's the end game that people dread and that's what I'm scared of

Before you can kill a demon, you have to be able to say it's name. Names have power. While the word Alzheimer's terrorizes us, it has power over us. When we are prepared to discuss it aloud, we might have power over it. It's thought of as a mental illness and it is a physical illness, affecting the brain. There should be no shame in having it, yet people still don't talk about it

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.

People are bound to get excited when they see a ten-million-ton starship trying to fly down the street.

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.

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.

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

In the end the problem isn't that you have the wrong sort of government for the People, but that you have the wrong sort of People.

Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.

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

Blessings be on this house," Granny said, perfunctorily. It was always a good opening remark for a witch. It concentrated people's minds on what other things might be on this house.

Lots of people would be as cowardly as me if they were brave enough.

Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.

Tiffany has been apprenticing as a witch by visiting people in need with her mentor. After meeting with one particularly sad case, she tells her mentor, "It shouldn't be like this." Her mentor replies, "There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.

Knowing things is magical, if other people don't know them.

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.

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.

Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.

Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people.

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

These people were not only cheering, they were throwing flowers and hats. The hats were made of stone, but the thought was there.

I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.

But you ain't part of it, are you?" said Granny conversationally. "You try, but you always find yourself watchin' yourself watchin' people, eh? Never quite believin' anything? Thinkin' the wrong thoughts?

Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.

I was just a kid then. But I won't forget. Nor will others. There's lots of people with reason to hate the Church.

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

Were you proposing to shoot these people in cold blood, sergeant?" "Nossir. Just a warning shot inna head, sir.

A lot hinges on the fact that, in most circumstances, people are not allowed to hit you with a mallet. They put up all kinds of visible and invisible signs that say, 'Do not do this' in the hope that it'll work, but if it doesn't, then they shrug, because there is, really, no real mallet at all.

What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?

Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.

Contrary to popular belief and hope, people don't usually come running when they hear a scream. That's not how humans work. Humans look at other humans and say, 'Did you hear a scream?' because the first scream might have been you screaming inside your head, or a horse backfiring.

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.

Other people salted away money for their old age, but Nanny preferred to accumulate memories.

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.

…We were born vampires." "I thought you became –" "— vampires by being bitten? Dear me, no. Oh, we can turn people into vampires, it’s an easy technique, but what would be the point? When you eat… now what is it you eat? Oh yes, chocolate… you don’t want to turn it into another Agnes Nitt, do you? Less chocolate to go around." He sighed. "Oh dear, superstition, superstition everywhere we turn.

The people of Ankh-Morpork had a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to entertainment, and while they were looking forward to seeing a dragon slain, they'd be happy to settle instead for seeing someone being baked alive in his own armour. You didn't get the chance every day to see someone baked alive in their own armour. It would be something for the children to remember.

When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.

Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe in them or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.

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.

Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn’t do good for people, she did right by them.

There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.

People's whole lives do pass in front of their eye before dying. The process is called "Living

The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then.

Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything…

Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.

Ach, people are always telling us not to do things" said Rob Anybody, "that's how we ken the most interesting things to do.

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.

No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable

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.

The universe was bad enough without people poking it.

Mr. Tulip lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone repeatedly with a wrench.