Top 500 Terry Pratchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, if you ever find anything I wouldn’t do.”

— Terry Pratchett

203. “The conflict is not between Christianity and Islam or between East and West – instead, it is between stupid people and other stupid people.”

— Terry Pratchett

204. “A good man will kill you with hardly a word.”

— Terry Pratchett

205. “Happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.”

— Terry Pratchett

206. “I commend my soul to any god that can find it.”

— Terry Pratchett

207. “I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.”

— Terry Pratchett

208. “Don’t be smart. Smart is only a polished version of dumb. Try intelligence. It will surely see you through.”

— Terry Pratchett

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

— Terry Pratchett

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “The truth isn’t easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap and much more difficult to find.”

— Terry Pratchett

214. “They think written words are even more powerful,’ whispered the toad. ‘They think all writing is magic. Words worry them. See their swords? They glow blue in the presence of lawyers.”

— Terry Pratchett

215. “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

216. “Sometimes the only thing you could do for people was to be there.”

— Terry Pratchett

217. “In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.”

— Terry Pratchett

218. “Few things are hidden from a quiet child with good eyesight.”

— Terry Pratchett

219. “Fascism may be good at making the trains run on time, but you wouldn’t like some of the destinations.”

— Terry Pratchett

Featured in: Destination Quotes

220. “An ancient proverb summed it up when a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, it ran, he is tired of life.”

— Terry Pratchett

221. “Most modern fantasy just rearranges the furniture in Tolkien’s attic.”

— Terry Pratchett

222. “When I am old I shall wear midnight.”

— Terry Pratchett

223. “All he knew was that you couldn’t hope to try for the big stuff, like world peace and happiness, but you might just about be able to achieve some tiny deed that’d make the world, in a small way, a better place. Like shooting someone.”

— Terry Pratchett

224. “The world is a globe – the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.”

— Terry Pratchett

225. “The mountains of madness have many little plateau of sanity.”

— Terry Pratchett

226. “Either all days are holy or none are.”

— Terry Pratchett

227. “The thing about football – the important thing about football – is that it is not just about football.”

— Terry Pratchett

228. “Sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.”

— Terry Pratchett

229. “All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel – or if there was, it was an oncoming train.”

— Terry Pratchett

230. “Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.”

— Terry Pratchett

231. “Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because – what with trolls and dwarfs and so on – speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.”

— Terry Pratchett

232. “The Kraken stirs. And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.”

— Terry Pratchett

233. “The reaper does not listen to the harvest.”

— Terry Pratchett

234. “Science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on outside.”

— Terry Pratchett

235. “I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.”

— Terry Pratchett

236. “The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.”

— Terry Pratchett

237. “Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo.”

— Terry Pratchett

238. “My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.”

— Terry Pratchett

239. “Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don’t.”

— Terry Pratchett

240. “I tell you, commander, it’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.”

— Terry Pratchett

241. “The jurisdiction of a good man extends to the end of the world.”

— Terry Pratchett

242. “I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.”

— Terry Pratchett

243. “Magic never dies. It merely fades away.”

— Terry Pratchett

244. “It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.”

— Terry Pratchett

245. “Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.”

— Terry Pratchett

246. “When you stand between two mirrors you’re spread out among the images, your whole soul is pulled out thin, and somewhere in the distant images a dark part of you might get out and come looking for you, if you aren’t careful.”

— Terry Pratchett

247. “The significant owl hoots in the night.”

— Terry Pratchett

248. “Stand before your god, bow before your king, kneel before your man.”

— Terry Pratchett

249. “Look, that’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break ’em.”

— Terry Pratchett

250. “Demons were like genies or philosophy professors – if you didn’t word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.”

— Terry Pratchett