Quotes from Terry Pratchett

You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

people didn't seem to be able to remember what it was like with the elves around. Life was certainly more interesting then, but usually because it was shorter. And it was more colorful, if you liked the color of blood.

Esme Weatherwax hadn't done nice. She'd done what was needed .

When she spoke again it was in the thin, careful and above all brave voice of someone who has pulled themselves together despite overwhelming odds but might let go again at any moment.

Thunder rolled . . It rolled a six.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters

A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING. People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.

This wasn't food - it was what food became if it had been good and gone to food heaven.

I don't think I've drunk enough beer to understand that.

People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!

It was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying.

If you don't know when to be a human being, you don't know when to be a witch.

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.

Just because you're an angel doesn't mean you have to be a fool.

It's daft, locking us up, said Nanny. I'd have had us killed. That's because you're basically good, said Magrat. The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.

I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.

I wouldn't trust you with a bucket of water if my knickers were on fire!

What was supposed to be so special about a full moon? It was only a big circle of light. And the dark of the moon was only darkness. But halfway between the two, when the moon was between the worlds of light and dark, when even the moon lived on the edge...maybe then a witch could believe in the moon.

It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.

The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.

I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm. At the time this was the last thing on my mind...

You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn't, he sent men to come and take it away.