“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, 'You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“What's a philosopher?' said Brutha.
Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote (provided that he wasn't poor, foreign, nor disqualified by reason of being mad, frivolous, or a woman). Every five years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy. Immediately after he was elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal madman and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher in the street looking for a towel. And then five years later they elected another one just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent people kept on making the same mistakes.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time...”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“I think," he said, "I think, if you want thousands, you have to fight for one.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“Words are the litmus paper of the mind.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“There’s no point in believing in things that exist.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all is truth beauty and is beauty truth, and does a falling tree in the forest make a sound if there's no one there to hear it, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“It's hard to explain," said Brutha. "But I think it's got something to do with how people should behave... you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
Terry Pratchett
Born place: in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, The United Kingdom
Born date April 28, 1948
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“Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Moby-Dick
“We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.”
― Matthew Desmond, quote from Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
“Everyone the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will never cast out. ”
― quote from HCSB: Holman Christian Standard Bible
“The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.”
― Donald J. Trump, quote from Trump: The Art of the Deal
“A day may come when all hope is lost; when the oceans run red with our blood, and our darkest hour is upon us— and when it comes, that red day of reckoning, we turn, my dears, not to our rulers-in-good-times, but to our leaders-in-bad-times.”
― Louise Blackwick, quote from The Weaver of Odds
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BrooklynBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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