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161 " It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks. "
― Terry Pratchett , Going Postal (Discworld, #33; Moist von Lipwig, #1)
162 " Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground. "
― Terry Pratchett , Small Gods (Discworld, #13)
163 " A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her. "
― Terry Pratchett , Wintersmith (Discworld, #35; Tiffany Aching, #3)
164 " The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it. "
― Terry Pratchett , Jingo (Discworld, #21; City Watch, #4)
165 " And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. "
― Terry Pratchett , Carpe Jugulum (Discworld #23; Witches #6)
166 " Oh. I see. People don't want to see what can't possibly exist. "
― Terry Pratchett , Mort (Discworld, #4; Death, #1)
167 " Polly felt questing eyes boring into her. She was embarrassed, of course. But not for the obvious reason. It was for the other one, the little lesson that life sometimes rams home with a stick: you are not the only one watching the world. Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you. "
― Terry Pratchett , Monstrous Regiment (Discworld, #31; Industrial Revolution, #3)
168 " History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time. "
169 " Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. "
― Terry Pratchett , Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
170 " It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things. "
171 " Peace?' said Vetinari. 'Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war. "
― Terry Pratchett , Unseen Academicals (Discworld, #37; Rincewind #8)
172 " It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus. "
173 " Men marched away, Vimes. And men marched back. How glorious the battles would have been that they never had to fight! "
174 " And now I demand that you do what the ignorant might feel is the easier thing. You must refrain from dying in battle. Revenge is not redress. Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards. The dead are not your masters. "
175 " Now we have travelled a hundred million steps from the Datum, we are finding life systems entirely unlike our own - and yet we still find war. Must it always be so? "
― Terry Pratchett , The Long Mars (The Long Earth, #3)
176 " History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders. "
177 " He said to people: you’re free. And they said hooray, and then he showed them what freedom costs and they called him a tyrant and, as soon as he’d been betrayed, they milled around a bit like barn-bred chickens who’ve seen the big world outside for the first time, and then they went back into the warm and shut the door... "
― Terry Pratchett , Feet of Clay (Discworld, #19; City Watch, #3)
178 " But...well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg. "
― Terry Pratchett , Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6)
179 " Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon... "
― Terry Pratchett
180 " The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog's wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It's like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you. "
― Terry Pratchett , Moving Pictures (Discworld, #10; Industrial Revolution, #1)