Terry Pratchett Quotes

Philosophy is for the few.

Nigeria must be one of the very few countries in the world where a man’s source of wealth is of no concern to his neighbors, the public or the government. Once a man is able to dole out money, the churches pray for him, he collects chieftancy titles and hobnobs with those who govern. The message to those who have not made it is clear: just be rich, the ways and means are irrelevant

Philosophers are men hired by the well-to-do to prove that everything is all right.

The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a) he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don't ; b) he has a high IQ, but they don't.

Sadly, the pernicious ironies of privilege talk are generally lost on those who claim to be most aware of privilege.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

There are some who write, talk, and think, so much about vice and virtue, that they have no time to practice either the one or the other.

I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.

In high school I read [Lev] Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and loved it. Then I read [Friedrich] Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" and that hit me hard. I don't know where I got it. My parents warned me not to mention either of those books when I went for my college interviews so I wouldn't seem like an egghead. They told me to talk about sports.

For me or a Bruce Springsteen to sit up in our ivory towers and make comments about racism, well, were not really in it, are we?

Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.

The term "intellectual" is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility.

There's not even real *popularity* at my school." "That," Coli said emphatically, "is a sentence that has only ever been spoken by popular people.

They, the conservatives, are the real outsides, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social "betters" to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.

BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think. That which distinguishes the man who is content to be something from the man who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on. In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.

Those lucky enough to qualify as "intellectuals" have their own special responsibilities, deriving from their good fortune. Among these is the task that [Edward] Said describes, surely an important one.

Apparently there are some things so stupid only someone from Harvard could say them.

Real loss is only possible when you love something more than you love yourself.

For me, who only desire to become wise, not more learned or eloquent, these logical or Aristotelian dispositions of parts are of no use.

You have a college degree? You can barely talk.

You know who's also joining the Wall Street protesters? Kanye West. That's a real good idea -- a guy with diamonds in his teeth protesting greed.

If, in any individual, university training produces a taste for refined idleness, a distaste for sustained effort, a barren intellectual arrogance, or a sense of superfluous aloofness from the world of real men who do the world's real work, then it has harmed that individual.

It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is ideas. Ideas live; men die.