Author: Terry Pratchett

Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Characteristics

‘Pessimist’ is a word used by optimists to describe someone who sees the world for what it really is.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Communication Language Life

Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Science/Weather

If life was a party, he wasn’t even in the kitchen.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Insults Life

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Life

Don’t think of it as dying; just think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Death

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Characteristics

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Situations

An education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease; it made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Education

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

(1948 – ) English novelist
Animals

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Intelligence Thinking

Thud!

(1948 – ) English novelist
Book Titles

What our ancestors would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is: “Why is it so dark in here?”

(1948 – ) English novelist
Miscellaneous

Gods like to see an atheist around… gives them something to aim at.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Beliefs God

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

(1948 – ) English novelist
Intelligence People Things

It’s hard to be famous and alive.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Death Life

Where's My Cow?

(1948 – ) English novelist
Book Titles

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Intelligence Stupidity

The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel; this is essentially the basis of all military thinking.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Conflict Government Military War

He] had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Intelligence Mind

Only in our dreams are we free; the rest of the time we need wages.

(1948 – ) English novelist
Life Money