Top 500 Terry Pratchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side!”

— Terry Pratchett

152. “After all, when you seek advice from someone it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.”

— Terry Pratchett

153. “Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.”

— Terry Pratchett

154. “The best research you can do is to talk to people.”

— Terry Pratchett

155. “Freedom without limits is just a word.”

— Terry Pratchett

156. “You have reached the end of cake.”

— Terry Pratchett

157. “Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber.”

— Terry Pratchett

158. “The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.”

— Terry Pratchett

159. “The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, “What about me?” and you can just hear the universe replying, “Well, what about you?””

— Terry Pratchett

160. “Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.”

— Terry Pratchett

161. “The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.”

— Terry Pratchett

162. “Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.”

— Terry Pratchett

163. “There is always time for another last minute.”

— Terry Pratchett

164. “He’d been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.”

— Terry Pratchett

165. “Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.”

— Terry Pratchett

166. “You get all sorts of people in the library, and the librarian gets it all...”

— Terry Pratchett

167. “If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.”

— Terry Pratchett

168. “She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.”

— Terry Pratchett

169. “We’re philosophers. We think, therefore we are.”

— Terry Pratchett

170. “The trouble with life was that you didn’t get a chance to practice before doing it for real.”

— Terry Pratchett

Featured in: Real Quotes

171. “The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain – the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn.”

— Terry Pratchett

172. “The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters.”

— Terry Pratchett

173. “Every step is a first step if it’s a step in the right direction.”

— Terry Pratchett

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

174. “Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.”

— Terry Pratchett

175. “History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it.”

— Terry Pratchett

176. “Hello, inner child, I’m the inner babysitter!”

— Terry Pratchett

177. “If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.”

— Terry Pratchett

Featured in: Real Quotes

178. “A bad hunter chases. A good hunter waits.”

— Terry Pratchett

179. “Everything makes sense a bit at a time. But when you try to think of it all at once, it comes out wrong.”

— Terry Pratchett

180. “Students, eh? Love ’em or hate ’em, you can’t hit them with a shovel!”

— Terry Pratchett

181. “If failure had no penalty success would not be a prize.”

— Terry Pratchett

182. “Witches were a bit like cats. They didn’t much like one another’s company, but they did like to know where all the other witches were, just in case they needed them.”

— Terry Pratchett

183. “Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.”

— Terry Pratchett

184. “One day I’ll be dead and THEN you’ll all be sorry.”

— Terry Pratchett

185. “Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.”

— Terry Pratchett

186. “And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

— Terry Pratchett

187. “What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?”

— Terry Pratchett

188. “Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It’s a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.”

— Terry Pratchett

Featured in: Fun Quotes

189. “The Auditors fluttered anxiously. And, as always happens in their species when something goes radically wrong and needs fixing instantly, they settled down to try to work how who was to blame.”

— Terry Pratchett

190. “It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.”

— Terry Pratchett

191. “As we all know, the Discworld is a flat planet – like a geological pizza, but without the anchovies.”

— Terry Pratchett

192. “Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Meters, the Mile, the Marathon – he’d run them all.”

— Terry Pratchett

193. “Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it.”

— Terry Pratchett

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

— Terry Pratchett

195. “You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that’s going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.”

— Terry Pratchett

Featured in: Reading Quotes

196. “The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.”

— Terry Pratchett

197. “Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.”

— Terry Pratchett

198. “Witches aren’t like that. We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.”

— Terry Pratchett

199. “If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.”

— Terry Pratchett

200. “The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.”

— Terry Pratchett