Terry Pratchett

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time...

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.

You did what you were told or you didn't get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn't your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn't your fault, no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care.

He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like "core values" at him with impunity.

If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.

Witches are naturally nosy,_ said Miss Tick, standing up. __ell, I must go. I hope we shall meet again. I will give you some free advice, though.___ill it cost me anything?___hat? I just said it was free!_ said Miss Tick.__es, but my father said that free advice often turns out to be expensive,_ said Tiffany.Miss Tick sniffed. __ou could say this advice is priceless,_ she said, __re you listening?___es,_ said Tiffany.__ood. Now...if you trust in yourself...___es?__...and believe in your dreams...___es?__...and follow your star..._ Miss Tick went on.__es?__...you__l still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren__ so lazy. Goodbye.

There is never a bad time for a pun. There__ also never really a good time for a pun. You might as well just stay braced for a pun at all times, and ride them when they come with as much grace as you can manage.The fact that you can replace __un_ with __isaster_ in the last three rules says a lot about the human race.

He shrugged. - They're just people - he said. - They're just doing what people do. Sir.Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile.- Of course, of course - he said. - You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you'd go quite mad. Otherwise you'd think you're standing on a feather-thin bridge over the vaults of Hell. Otherwise existence would be a dark agony and the only hope would be that there is no life after death. I quite understand.

I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people.

I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly.He appeared to consider this. "Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?

Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Contrary to popular belief and hope, people don't usually come running when they hear a scream. That's not how humans work. Humans look at other humans and say, 'Did you hear a scream?' because the first scream might have been you screaming inside your head, or a horse backfiring.

And just when you__ think [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they occasionally showed more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of.

Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.