The Long Utopia Quotes

“PROFESSOR EMERITUS WOTAN Ulm, of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial memoir Peer Reviewers and Other Idiots: A Life In Academia, had consented to give a recorded lecture on von Neumann replicators to be carried as briefing material on the US Navy twain USS Brian Cowley.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“Apprehend. Be humble in the face of the universe. Do good. Eleven words. Three rules.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“Life gets boring with only humans to talk to.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long Utopia

“Fortune, he thought, follows the already fortunate.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“Agnes could read the history of this place, this hilltop. The first settlers here must have made a start clearing fields for their crops or livestock, even put up these grand houses. Then, after no tile at all, they had evidently given up and wondered off to do – well, whatever it was most people did around here to make a living these days. And now here was the forest already taking back the land, or trying to.”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long Utopia

“I despise the religions we have, nothing but flummery and manipulation based on texts and materials so reworked over time they’re all meaningless. I despise the division religions religions bring; humans have enough problems without that. I despise con men like Father Melly. And yet, and yet …”
― Stephen Baxter, The Long Utopia

“I despise the religions we have”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“He regarded Hackett bleakly. Fortune, he thought, follows the already fortunate.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“liminal”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“a remarkable feat of almost pointless craftsmanship.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“anything, given raw materials, including copies of themselves. And that’s the clever bit. Earlier the great physicist John von Neumann had shown that such machines are theoretically possible”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“In a place like this you can reject the answers those builders accepted, you can even reject the questions they asked, but you have to cherish the urge to ask such sublime questions in the first place.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“PROFESSOR EMERITUS WOTAN Ulm, of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial memoir Peer Reviewers and Other Idiots: A Life In Academia, had consented to give a recorded lecture”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“Apprehend. Which is a nice word if you roll it around your mouth. Apprehend. ‘It doesn’t just mean “understand”, although it includes that meaning, fully. It means you should face the truth of the world – not let yourself be fooled by how you’d like it to be. You should try to be fully aware of the richness of reality, of the mixed-up complexity of all the processes going right back to the birth of the stars that have produced you and the world you live in, and this very moment . . . ‘And”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“we should reach for the numinous, you see, not through the infinite but through the infinitesimal.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“I know not how I seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with while the vast ocean of undiscovered truth lies before me . . .”’ Agnes”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“Windsor Castle seemed to Luis from without an intimidating pile, an excrescence of centuries of wealth heaped up on a core of medieval brutality.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“And Joshua saw that that really was how Rod thought about the world, or worlds: as a kind of endless now, an endless here, a place where location and time didn’t matter – and endlessly generous, a place you didn’t need to work at, didn’t need to build on, or fix. A place of endless escape.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“Hey, kitty. So you found the nest?”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“Chak pa!”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia

“Can I have that last chicken sandwich?”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia