76 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
"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."-- Terry Pratchett
Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.-- Terry Pratchett
I try to make computers say things like "You have 60 seconds to achieve safe distance".-- Terry Pratchett
Don't you talk to me about progress. Progress just means bad things happen faster.-- Terry Pratchett
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.-- Mike Adams
"Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends."-- S. Weir Mitchell
"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
Politics is storytelling. We just pick the one we like best.
"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)
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.)
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
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
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
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)
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)
The sun is like breasts - risky to look at unless you've got sunglasses.
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)
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)
A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.
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
"[The] human mind was like a compass. No matter how much you shook it up, no matter what happened to it, sooner or later it'd carry on pointing the same way."-- Terry Pratchett (Johnny and the Dead)
I like being single. I'm always there when I need me.-- Art Leo
"Question Authority. They usually know where the bathroom is."-- Daria
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn't mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.-- Terry Pratchett (Sourcery)
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)
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)
I always call it 'Tour Flu', because two or three weeks in hot bookshops with hundreds of people usually produces an ailment of some kind. Going on tour is like a box of rare diseases--you never know what you're going to get.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls.-- Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic)
Nobody ever forgets where he buried a hatchet.-- Kin Hubbard
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
"The class was learning about some revolt in which some peasants had wanted to stop being peasants and, since the nobles had won, had stopped being peasants really quickly."-- Terry Pratchett (Soul Music)
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.-- Terry Pratchett (Night Watch)
DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot'.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
Computer Science without FORTRAN and COBOL is like birthday cake without ketchup and mustard.
I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
I was thinking of 'duh?' in the sense of 'a sentence containing several words more than three letters long, and possibly requiring general knowledge or a sense of history that extends past last Tuesday, has been used in my presense.'-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.-- Albert Camus
"You mean it's all pretending?" said Victor.
The trolls exchanged a brief glance, which nevertheless contrived to say: amazing, isn't it, that things like this apparently rule the world.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
The door opened. It opened very slowly, and with the maximum amount of creak. Simple neglect wouldn't have caused that depth of groan; you'd need careful work with hot water over a period of weeks.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.-- Terry Pratchett
Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business.
The trick was to do magic and get away with it.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
AFPer: Terry, what the heck was going on at the end of Strata? I've just re-read the ending again and come up with another possible explanation which takes the total number into double figures.
TP: See? Other people would just have given you one or two. Amazing value, I think.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
Magrat shivered. She told herself that a witch had absolute control over her own body, and the goosepimples under her thin nightdress were just a figment of her own imagination. The trouble was, she had an excellent imagination.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it.-- Terry Pratchett
It's an old magical principle -- it's even filtered down into RPG systems -- that magic, while taking a lot of effort, can be 'stored' -- in a staff, for example. No doubt a wizard spends a little time each day charging up his staff, although you go blind if you do it too much, of course.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
Ponder: "It's all done by magic, Archchancellor."
Ridcully: "Ah. Right. None of that complicated business with springs and cogwheels and tubes and stuff, then."
Ponder: "That's right, sir. Just magic. Sufficiently advanced magic."-- Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
"One minute I'm just another rabbit and happy about it, next minute whazaam, I'm thinking. That's a major drawback if you're looking for happiness as a rabbit, let me tell you. You want grass and sex, not thoughts like 'What's it all about, when you get right down to it?'"-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
I save about twenty drafts -- that's ten meg of disc space -- and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)