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Danh ngôn của Terry Pratchett (Sứ mệnh: 8)

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
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.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.
Freedom without limits is just a word.
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.
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
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.
Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.
It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.
The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?
It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.
I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.
I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.
Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?
If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.
I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.
By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
The harder I work, the luckier I become.
Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.