Terry Pratchett Quotes

I think the intelligent thing about it is that you have to carefully listen to it all to grasp it, and because I'm not in every scene - colossal disappointment to everybody that it may be - I'm not getting the full picture here today while recording it.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

You either hear the story and you're curious, and you're sort of sympathetic, or you think, "Ugh, how horrible." That's dehumanizing. How about we take that and turn Christine Chubbuck into a person and it's not about the final act, it's about her life. I felt that really strongly, and I felt a sort of deep sympathy with her. It's also why I do what I do. I want to try to make difficult people somehow relatable.

I think if you're going to show a true representation of any one life, it can't be about any one thing. I try to see more of a full picture, with the romance just a single part.

I feel like I can't fully understand what's happening now until I really understand what's happened before. But you do get sort of bogged down a little bit when you're trying to study so many years' worth of music. It can be a little bit overwhelming.

Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious.

I think we all ought to be careful about too much generalization on this issue, even as I confess to painting with a pretty broad brush myself!

Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.

You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.

Whenever I'm giving talks, I always ask people to think of the most obscure questions because I enjoy those the most. I always get the same questions: Why does Pickwick say "plock" and will there be a movie? I like the really obscure questions because there's so much in the books. There are tons and tons of references and I like when people get the little ones and ask me about them. It's good for the audience [and also] they realize there's more there.

I'm glad that we have a history at all and that we can talk about feminist history. But I do think that it doesn't really pay attention to the complexity and the nuance that is feminist thought.

There is simply too much to think about.

The key is really just saying my brain isn't big enough to figure out why everything happens. It would be like an ant trying to understand the internet.

Do not think too deeply about these things - gradually they will become clearer to you

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true.

The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.

To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.

I would not be able to retain all the information, all the medical jargon these doctors do. I'm not really intelligent enough is what I'm saying.

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

We know too much for one man to know too much.

There seems no plan because it is all plan.

The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.

Having said that, what I think we found, in doing the show, and in life, generally, is that the more you try to separate sex from everything else, it's impossible. You can't. The act of observation affects the actual experiment, and we see that in this.

Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.