Muhip Tezcan > Muhip's Quotes

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“He said it was better to belong where you don't belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

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

“And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“He hated games they made the world look too simple. Chess, in particular, had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the king lounged about doing nothing. If only the pawns would've united ... the whole board could've been a republic in about a dozen moves.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thud!

“There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye. ”
― Terry Pratchett, The Truth: Stage Adaptation

“A young man of godlilke proportions* was standing in the doorway.

* The better class of gods, anyway. Not the ones with the tentacles, obviously.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thud!

“Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people," mumbled Sam.
"Do they?" said Vimes. "Then why doesn't anyone do anything about it?"
"'cos they torture people.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."
Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.”
― Terry Pratchett

“...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“Ginger: You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?... It's all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they're really good at. It's all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It's all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It's all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it's even possible to find out. It's all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be. It's all the wasted chances.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“It was written in some holy book, apparently, so that made it okay, and probably compulsory.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thud!

“It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.”
― Terry Pratchett

“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, Small Gods

“Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“So much universe, and so little time.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Faustus: Stay, Mephistopheles, and tell me, what good will
my soul do thy lord?

Mephistopheles: Enlarge his kingdom.

Faustus: Is that the reason he tempts us thus?

Mephistopheles: Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris.
(It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.)”
― Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

“Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain