Terry Pratchett Quotes

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Terry Pratchett

Profession : Author

Birth : April 28, 1948

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

Terry Pratchett

The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?

Terry Pratchett

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

Terry Pratchett

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.

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

I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

Terry Pratchett

In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.

Terry Pratchett

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Terry Pratchett

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Terry Pratchett

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

Terry Pratchett

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

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

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.

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? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

Terry Pratchett

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Terry Pratchett

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

Terry Pratchett

It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

Terry Pratchett

The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.

Terry Pratchett

It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.

Terry Pratchett

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Terry Pratchett