Quotes

50 hits

Natural vs. unnatural is a pretty worthless distinction.
-- Greg Parkinson
Only to someone such as yourself, with a deliberate disability to perceive the difference.
-- Bob Sarver
But easy for someone like you, who can manufacture the difference on the spot.
-- Mike Batchelor

Watching these guys trying to be wireheads is like watching old people fuck
-- Mike Belt

Baby orang-otans look like surprised coconuts.
-- Terry Pratchett

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
-- Mike Adams

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

"And then the world went mad. All right, madder."
-- Terry Pratchett (Pyramids)

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."
-- Terry Pratchett

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".
-- Terry Pratchett ("The Colour of Magic")

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs.
-- Mike Andrews (a.s.r.)

"In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded."
-- Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
-- Terry Pratchett

"Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned."
-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

If I heeded all the advice I've had over the years, I'ld have written 18 books about Rincewind.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Don't you talk to me about progress. Progress just means bad things happen faster.
-- Terry Pratchett

'He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.'
-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

I try to make computers say things like "You have 60 seconds to achieve safe distance".
-- Terry Pratchett

Every procedure for getting a cat to take a pill works fine -- once.
Like the Borg, they learn...
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples' weakness, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate.
-- Mike Hermann

"A giant woman carrying a screaming ape up a tall building," sighed Dibbler.
-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

"Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends."
-- S. Weir Mitchell

It wasn't a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but that's the weather for you.
-- Terry Pratchett (Good Omens)

Politics is storytelling. We just pick the one we like best.

The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish.
-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

'If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter.'
-- Terry Pratchett (concerning popcorn, Moving Pictures)

The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.
-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
-- Terry Pratchett

Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb--they're often students, for heaven's sake.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

"See?" said the cat. "Give them an opposed thumb and they think they're something special."
-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

"He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat."
-- Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

I'm sure we can arrange an academic scholarship for Detritus. Troll cheerleaers would be nice: 'Two... four.... er.. many... lots'.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
-- Terry Pratchett

The sun is like breasts - risky to look at unless you've got sunglasses.

Mort isn't fashionable UK movie material -- there's no parts in it for Hugh or Emma, it's not set in Sheffield, and no one shoves drugs up their bum...
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
-- Terry Pratchett

"I like butter and the people who like butter."
-- Tori Amos (Dew Drop In Tour, June 12, 1996)

The singing wasn't particularly good. The only word the singer appeared to know was "la," but she was making it work hard.
-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)

She wanted a holiday in Australia, she said, and if I turned it into work she'd hit me--so I gave in, because I did not want to be beaten about the Bush.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.
-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

What you have here is an example of that well known phenomenon, A Bookshop Assistant Who Knows Buggerall But Won't Admit It (probably some kind of arts graduate).
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

You can't remember the plot of the Dr. Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.
-- Terry Pratchett ("Equal Rites")

"The I.S.O. standard unit of female pulchritude is the milli-Helen. This is the amount of beauty capable of causing the launching of a single ship."
-- Terry Pratchett

I like being single. I'm always there when I need me.
-- Art Leo

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)