"Belief is the death of intelligence."
— Robert Anton Wilson

"The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization."
— Robert Anton Wilson

"...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable."
— Robert Anton Wilson

"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 (Diggers)

"It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it."
— Terry Pratchett

"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this."
— Terry Pratchett

"No! Please! I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the man yelled.
"Really?" said Vimes. "What's the orbital velocity of the moon?"
"What?"
"Oh, you'd like something simpler?"
— Terry Pratchett (Night Watch)

"Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom."
— Terry Pratchett

"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
— Terry Pratchett

"A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read."
— Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
— Terry Pratchett (Thief of Time)

"If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you."
— Terry Pratchett

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."
— Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

"He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower."
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)

"DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH."
— Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"And what would humans be without love?"

"Rare," said Death."
— Terry Pratchett (Sourcery)

"Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!'"
— Terry Pratchett (The Color of Magic)

"I'd rather be a climbing ape than a falling angel."
— Terry Pratchett

"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."
— Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized."
— Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times)

"Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"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

"'All right,' said Susan. 'I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable.
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE
'Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little-
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES
'So we can believe the big ones?
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING
'They're not the same at all!
YOU THINK SO? THEN 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--
Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME 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"
— Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

"In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the
cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat
could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
-- Schrodinger's Moggy explained"
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness."
— Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms)

"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players,* to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."
— Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"You can't map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs. "
— Terry Pratchett (The Color of Magic)

"Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them"
— Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

"Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove."
— Terry Pratchett (The Truth)

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead."
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)

"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
— William Ford Gibson

"Relieve stress through hysterical screaming"
— Tim Dorsey

"The whole family is a bunch of dangerous freaks...Most are ex-cons or junkies or deranged from inbreeding. Five have died violently, three are back in prison, two have gone insane from untreated venereal disease, and one writes book reviews."
— Tim Dorsey (Triggerfish Twist: A Novel)

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
— Mark Twain