Terry Pratchett Quotes

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity.

I've always found ways to bend the rules.

Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.

Gotta know the rules to break the rules.

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?

Rules, after all, are only made so you can work around them

I think it's important to break taboos for the same reason it's important to break laws and rules - because either you're a slave to them, or you're taking matters into your hands.

I follow the rules until I go against them all.

In order to deviate successfully, one has to have at least a passing acquaintance with whatever norm one expects to deviate from.

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.

People who get on at school are the ones who play by the rules, and no one's going to get far in later life playing by the system.

You're not allowed to be an eccentric in the world, you have to fit it.

Breaking accepted rules does bring people together.

I have always been mainstream. It's so weird, because I don't see it as something negative at all. So many people see it as something negative.

I'm such a Goody Two-shoes, but I get a vicarious thrill at someone sticking it to the Man.

To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

Some days, I think maybe we should try and be a little more conventional, but every time I try, I fail, so I'm learning to not even entertain that thought anymore.

To me, in life, if there's, like, a rule, and I think it's ridiculous, then of course I'll circumvent that but also point out how ridiculous the rule is. Other than that, if I go to a concert, and my seat is Row G, Seat 12, I'm sitting in Row G, Seat 12. I don't care if I'm with five other friends, I'm supposed to be in Seat 12, that's my seat.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

I'm an anti-standard operating procedure guy.

People don't know how to be outrageous anymore.

I like contradictions, and I like exceptions. I don't like rules and dogma.

I didn't do anything with the thought that I want to go against society or bend any rules.

The label of tasteful or tasteless is so often used to silence people and to maintain the status quo. It's used to shame people for not following the commonly accepted routine, for not aligning themselves with the status quo.