Quotes by Terry Pratchett

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

The trouble with being a god is that youve got no one to pray to.

Wizards dont believe in gods in the same way that most people dont find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know theyre there, they know theyre there for a purpose, theyd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldnt 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.

Be careful what you wish for. You never know who will be listening.

When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellows-point- of-view is seldom necessary.

Creators arent gods. They make places, which is quite hard. Its men that make gods. This explains a lot.

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 peoples doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.

Ankh-Morpork is a godless city--I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship? said Maladict. city, he recovered.

To be frank, I find religion rather offensive.

To tell you the truth, Im something of an atheist.

Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potters wheel. Thats 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 couldnt 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.

And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city, it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.

Vimes, listening with his mouth open, wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed that they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf was a religion. People went into the dark for the good of the clan, and heard things, and were changed, and came back to tell…And then, fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in Ankh-Morpork had found that if you put a simple fine mesh over your lantern flame itd burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldnt explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarfkind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war.And afterwards there were two kinds of dwarf, said Cheery sadly. Theres the Copperheads, who all use the lamp and the patent gas exploder, and the Schmaltzbergers, who stick to the old ways. Of course were all dwarfs, she said, but relations are strained.

She is standing just behind you. Just behind your right shoulder.In the silence of the woods, Polly turned.I cant see her, she said.I am happy for you, said Wazzer, handing her the empty mug.But I didnt see anything, said Polly.No, said Wazzer. But you turned around...

The Tezuman Empire in the jungle valleys of central Klatch is known for it organic market gardens, its exquisite craftsmanship in obsidian, feathers and jade, and its mass human sacrifices in honor of Quezovercoatl, the Feathered Boa, god of mass human sacrifices.

But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly.

Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode theyd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer its nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum! or Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!

If you do not know where you come from, then you dont know where you are, and if you dont know where you are, then you dont know where youre going. And if you dont know where youre going, youre probably going wrong.

As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children (as much as they can understand) there are lies-to-bosses (as much as they need to know) lies-to-patients (they wont worry about what they dont know) and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isnt quite what theyve been taught so far. Yes, but you needed to understand that, they are told, so that now we can tell you why it isnt exactly true. Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.

...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what youre attempting cant be done.