The Globe Quotes

“The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe

“Think critically about what you are told. Do not accept the word of authority unthinkingly. Science is not a belief system: no belief system instructs you to question the system itself. Science does. (There are many scientists, however, who treat it as a belief system. Be wary of them.)”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe

“There are some laws that are coded into the very nature of the universe, and one is: There Is Never Enough Shelf Space.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe

“Nowadays only cosmologists and particle physicists are allowed to invent new kinds of matter when they want to explain why their theories totally fail to match observed reality.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe

“That meant that he was in charge in the absence of the senior members of the faculty. And, currently, this being the spring break, they were absent. And so were the students. The University was, therefore, running at near peak efficiency.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe

“We are the storytelling chimpanzee, and we appreciate the meta-pattern involved in that.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“Keep in mind a distinction that is being imported into more and more scientific thinking, that between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’. ‘Complicated’ means a whole set of simple things working together to produce some effect, like a clock or an automobile: each of the components – brakes, engine, body-shell, steering – contributes to what the car does by doing its own thing, pretty well. There are some interactions, to be sure. When the engine is turning fast, it has a gyroscopic effect that makes the steering behave differently, and the gearbox affects how fast the engine is going at a particular car speed. To see human development as a kind of car assembly process, with the successive genetic blueprints ‘defining’ each new bit as we add them, is to see us as only complicated. A car being driven, however, is a complex system: each action it takes helps determine future actions and is dependent upon previous actions. It changes the rules for itself as it goes. So does a garden. As plants grow, they take nutrients from the soil, and this affects what else can grow there later. But they also rot down, adding nutrients, providing habitat for insects, grubs, hedgehogs … A mature garden has a very different dynamic from that of a new plot on a housing estate. Similarly, we change our own rules as we develop.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“It's one of the Archchancellor's Big Ideas. He says that if the faculty gets to know one another better, they'll be a happier, more efficient team.'
'But they do know one another! They've known one another for ages! That's why they don't like one another very much! They won't stand for being turned into a happy and efficent team!”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe

“History gets named afterwards: The Age of Enlightenment, the Depression. Which is not to say that people sometimes aren't depressed with all the enlightenment around them, or strangely elevated during otherwise grey times.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe

“The wizards' automatic response to any problem was to see if there was a book about it.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe

“Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“If intelligent beings are going to get along together without too much friction, it’s important to realise that other members of your species have an internal mental universe, which controls their actions in the same way that your own mind controls yours.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“In particular, we’re never going to run out of new books to write.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“Stories in which people learn from the failures of others are a hallmark of a civilised society.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“combinatorics is the art of counting without actually counting; if you listed all the possibilities and counted them ‘1, 2, 3, 4 …’ you’d never finish.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“What the universe actually does is a tiny proportion of all the things it could have done instead. For instance, suppose that a car park has one hundred parking slots, and that cars are either red, blue, green, white, or black. When the car park is full, how many different patterns of colour are there? Ignore the make of car, ignore how well or badly it is parked; focus solely on the pattern of colours. Mathematicians call this kind of question ‘combinatorics’, and they have devised all sorts of clever ways to find answers. Roughly speaking, combinatorics is the art of counting things without actually counting them. Many years ago a mathematical acquaintance of ours came across a university administrator counting light bulbs in the roof of a lecture hall. The lights were arranged in a perfect rectangular grid, 10 by 20. The administrator was staring at the ceiling, going ‘49, 50, 51 …’ ‘Two hundred,’ said the mathematician. ‘How do you know that?’ ‘Well, it’s a 10 by 20 grid, and 10 times 20 is 200.’ ‘No, no,’ replied the administrator. ‘I want the exact number.’*2 Back”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“the mind is a metaphor machine.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“we make up our world according to the stories that we tell ourselves, and each other, about it.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“mental models are stories, simplified narratives that correspond in a rough-hewn way to aspects of the world that we consider to be important.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“Narrative Causality, the power of story. A spell is a story about what a person wants to happen,”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II

“Don't argue with a voice saying run away.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe

“Poincaré’s phase space viewpoint has proved to be so useful that nowadays you’ll find it in every area of science – and in areas that aren’t science at all. A major consumer of phase spaces is economics”
― Terry Pratchett, The Globe: The Science of Discworld II