Sergey > Sergey's Quotes

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The most I can hope for is to die in a pose that confuses future archaeologists.”
― Yahtzee Croshaw, Jam

“This was how I would die. Strangled by an attractive, seminaked woman inside a fridge with a giant tarantula in the middle of a sea of carnivorous jam. As I blacked out, all I could think of was a fortune teller I'd spoken to a few years ago, and how full of shit she'd turned out to be.”
― Yahtzee Croshaw, Jam

“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.
- The R-Selectors, Trunclade”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying 'Got rocks in your head?' to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren't careful.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“And give me some coffee. Black as midnight on a moonless night."
Harga looked surprised. That wasn't like Vimes.
"How black's that, then?" he said.
"Oh, pretty damn black, I should think."
"Not necessarily."
"What?"
"You get more stars on a moonless night. Stands to reason. They show up more. It can be quite bright on a moonless night."
Vimes sighed.
"An overcast moonless night?" he said.
Harga looked carefully at his coffee pot.
"Cumulus or cirro-nimbus?"
"I'm sorry? What did you say?"
"You get city lights reflected off cumulus, because it's low lying, see. Mind you, you can get high-altitude scatter off the ice crystals in--"
"A moonless night," said Vimes, in a hollow voice, "that is as black as coffee.”
― Terry Pratchett Pratchett, Men at Arms

“He's bound to have done something,” Nobby repeated.

In this he was echoing the Patrician's view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
― Terry Pratchett, 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, Small Gods

“What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.”
― Terry Pratchett, 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, Small Gods

“Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, 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, Small Gods

“There’s no point in believing in things that exist.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Sometimes the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God."
"That's what my grandmother used to say," said Brutha automatically.
"Indeed? I would like to know more about this formidable lady."
"She used to give me a thrashing every morning because I would certainly do something to deserve it during the day," said Brutha.
"A most complete understanding of the nature of mankind,”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces.”
― Terry Pratchett, 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, Small Gods

“Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thud!

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“I know you’re almost forty, look almost thirty, think you’re just over twenty and act as though you’re barely ten.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Blood of Elves

“Nonsense," said the witcher. "And what's more, it doesn't rhyme. All decent predictions rhyme.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“The hypothesis of God, for instance, gives an incomparably absolute opportunity to understand everything and know absolutely nothing. Give man an extremely simplified system of the world and explain every phenomenon away on the basis of that system. An approach like that doesn't require any knowledge. Just a few memorized formulas plus so-called intuition and so-called common sense.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic