Terry Pratchett Quotes

Society develops a type of self-censorship, with the knowledge that surveillance exists - a self-censorship that is even expressed when people communicate with each other privately.

Some people only speak of freedom of speech while they're out of power. Once they're in power, they're ruthless in suppressing the rights of others.

I like sharing stuff with people. I feel like it's kind of at their own discretion, you can see too much if you want to see too much.

It is very unreasonable of people to expect one should be at home, because one is in the house. Of all privileges, that of invisibility is the most valuable.

It's a great kindness to trust people with a secret. They feel so important while telling it.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me

There have always been people like you, Nicholas Flamel. People who think they know what's best, who decide what people should see and read and listen to, who ultimately try to shape how the rest of the world think and acts. I've spent my entire life fighting the likes of you.

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

It was a book [George Packer written on our presence in Nigeria] that was killed by the response of other people. Which sounds quite cowardly, perhaps, but it was the first manifestation of what is currently a really big issue: how political correctness defines the limits of what you can do. In that sense, it was super-exciting and maybe the most magical project we did, but at the same time fraught with mixed feelings.

Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.

The freedom to speak is meaningless without the corollary freedom to keep silent.

I think that occasionally running away and crashing where people can't find you is important.

I think all the funny people were bullied. When they talk about outlawing bullying, it's like, what? You want no Comedy Central?

I love the life of an actor because you spend brief amounts of time with other people and then you just leave. I need to be alone a lot, and I need the outdoors.

I believe for freedom. I believe that people should express themselves the way they want, except as it does in the way that's not nice, but it is what it is.

In this time when a citizenry applauds the liberation of a country as it lives in fear of its own freedom, when people all over the country fear reprisal if they use their right to free speech, it is time to get angry. It is time to get fierce.

You have to allow your mind to create and then if you want to censor something and bring it down or point it in a different direction, then you can do it.

I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.

Ours is the "land of the free"-nobody denies that-nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.)

Whatever happened in the past doesn't really matter anymore to us right now.

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

There are very few people in our society who are actually free to say what they believe. I am in an extremely fortunate position in having this enormous gift of freedom and believe I should try to use it to do something useful for society. As long as I feel as if I have something to say, I’ll continue to try to do that.

If people don't know me, then I don't care what they say about me.

Insane means fewer cameras!