Terry Pratchett Men Quotations

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.

I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

That was the very centre of his genius - he invented things that anyone could have thought of, and men who can invent things that anyone could have thought of are very rare men.

Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate...

Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man!

Nac Mac Feegle! The Wee Free Men! Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna' be fooled again!

Needless to say, they refused to submit to the Empire, conducting such a persistent guerrilla war that the Romans gave up hope of conquering Scotland, and the Wee Free Men remained both wee and free.

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.

Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.

I saved a man's life once," said Granny. "Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.

If women were as good as men they'd be a lot better!

Well, it would have to be “The Man Who Was Thursday.” It’s a damn good read that I believe should be read by everyone in politics.

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

William: "I'm sure we can all pull together, sir." Vetinari: "Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.

Certainly I have no faith in Jehovah, although I think it quite likely that Jesus Christ, as a preacher and a wise man, did indeed exist.

Stand before your god, bow before your king, kneel before your man.

No! Please! I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the man yelled. "Really?" said Vimes. "What's the orbital velocity of the moon?" "What?" "Oh, you'd like something simpler?

I don't want unnecessary violence, sergeant," said Blouse. "Right you are, sir!" said the sergeant. "Carborundum! First man comes through that door runnin', I want him nailed to the wall!" He caught the lieutenant's eye, and added: "But not too hard!

Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.

What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?

Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we'd be melting the bronze already.

Let's see, now... in HOGFATHER there are a number of stabbings, someone's killed by a man made of knives, someone's killed by the dark, and someone just been killed by a wardrobe. It's a book about the magic of childhood. You can tell.

A good man will kill you with hardly a word.

The enemy isn’t men, or women, it’s bloody stupid people and no-one has the right to be stupid.

It's no wonder most religions are born in the desert, because when men lay beneath that boundless night sky and look up at the infinite expanse of creation they have an uncontrollable urge to put something in the way .

If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power... they will talk, they will gloat. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.

The truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant.

He’sh mad?’ ‘Sort of mad. But mad with lots of money.’ ‘Ah, then he can’t be mad. I’ve been around; if a man hash lotsh of money he’sh just ecshentric.

Sometimes I think a man could wander across the disc all his life and not see everything there is to see,' said Twoflower. 'And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel,' he paused, then added, 'well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.

Young man, the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.

Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that's who. (...)You saw how close men lived to the beast. You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast.

Shoes, men, coffins; never accept the first one you see.

I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.

WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN? The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato. SQUEAK, he said. Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.

He was certain he was anorectic, because every time he looked in a mirror he saw a fat man. It was the Archchancellor, standing behind him and shouting at him.

...the little man's total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away.

I know it’s not the right thing to say to a lady, miss, but you are sweating like a pig!" "My mother always said that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies merely glow…" "Is that so? Well, miss, you are glowing like a pig!

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

but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?

It's a terrible thing for a man when his woman gangs up on him wi' a toad

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.

Man just went past with a cat on his head,

Creators aren't gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It's men that make gods. This explains a lot.

They obeyed, as wise men do when a woman puts her foot down . . .

SOONER OR LATER ALL MEN MUST DIE. EVERYTHING DIES IN THE END. I CAN BE ROBBED BUT NEVER DENIED, I TOLD MYSELF. WHY WORRY? “I too cannot be cheated,” snapped Fate.

You are very clever," said the old man shyly. "I would like to eat your brains, one day.

This man was so absent-mindedly clever that he could paint pictures that didn’t just follow you around the room but went home with you and did the washing-up.

Gods play games with the fates of men. But first they have to get all the pieces on the board and look all over the place for the dice.

ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS. Death took a step backwards. It was impossible to read expression in Azrael's features. Death glanced sideways at the servants. LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?

And the people next door oppress me all night long. I tell them, I work all day, a man's got to have some time to learn to play the tuba. That's oppression, that is. If I'm not under the heel of the oppressor, I don't know who is.

They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.

Because no man wants to be a coward in front of a cheese.

You're not going to tell me they built fifty-foot-high killer golems, are you?" "Only a man would think of that. It's our job," said Moist. "If you don't think of fifty-foot-high killer golems first, someone else will.

There was a man and he had eight sons. Apart from that, he was nothing more than a comma on the page of History. It's sad, but that's all you can say about some people.

Death strode away, stopped, and came back. He pointed a skeletal finger at The Duck Man. WHY, he said, ARE YOU WALKING AROUND WITH THAT DUCK? "What duck?" AH. SORRY.

Tell someone you are going to rob them and all that will happen is that you'll get a reputation as a truthful man.

Any sensible ruler would have killed off Leonard, and Lord Vetinari was extremely sensible and often wondered why he had not done so. He'd decided that it was because, imprisoned in the priceless, inquiring amber of Leonard's massive mind, underneath that bright investigative genius was a kind of willful innocence that might in lesser men be called stupidity. It was the seat and soul of that force which, down the millennia, had caused mankind to stick its fingers in the electric light socket of the Universe and play with the switch to see what happened - and then be very surprised when it did.

No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for.

The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.

Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn't, he sent men to come and take it away.

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.

I'm trying to have a moment o' existential dreed here, right? Crivens, it's a puir lookout if a man canna feel the chilly winds o' fate lashing aroound his netheres wi'out folks telling him he's deid, eh?

Someone got killed up here.... It was outside. A tall man. He had one leg longer’n the other. And a beard. He was probably a hunter." "How’d you know all that?" "I just trod on ‘im.

What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.

Speak softly and employ a huge man with a crowbar.

It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things because. wow, then I could afford much *better* childish things!

The man gave a shrug which indicated that, although the world did indeed have many problems, this was one of them that was not his.

When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep slurry.

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.

They looked at one another in incomprehension, two minds driving opposite ways up a narrow street and waiting for the other man to reverse first.

Rincewind shivered. He was not, of course, an atheist; on the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists. On the few occasions when he had some spare change he had always made a point of dropping a few coppers into a temple coffer, somewhere, on the principle that a man needed all the friends he could get. But usually he didn't bother the Gods, and he hoped the Gods wouldn't bother him. Life was quite complicated enough.