Terry Pratchett Quotes

Well, when I was younger, I lied all the time, because once you understand the power of lying, it's really like magic because you transform reality for people.

The only person who has artistic control is the director, and 'director' is how you spell God in Hollywood.

Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything.

For a sorcerer, reality, or the world as we all know it, is only a description.

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.

I knew what I was doing, but I never really considered the magnitude of how my images were transformative to people.

The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.

Political conflict rests to a very large extent on a universal ignorance of consequences, as the people who are benefited by any particular act or policy are rarely those who struggled for it, and the people who are injured are rarely those who opposed it.

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it.

There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.

I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.

I'm at the mercy of others because I'm not a director. I'm not a producer. I'm not a writer.

History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it

We will never be able to fix a rigged system by counting on the same people who rigged it in the first place.

I sometimes wonder ... if the land is not destroying the people who inhabit it as the people who inhabit it are destroying the land. A magic continent, a Peculiar Treasure, stuffed with riches, millions in it are starving in the midst of plenty.

We're just ordinary people. We don't know which way to go.

Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job. The theater is left wing magic and theology is right wing magic.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

Because of my experience in Occupy, instead of asking the question, "Who will benefit from this system I'm implementing with the data?" I started to ask the question, "What will happen to the most vulnerable?" Or "Who is going to lose under this system? How will this affect the worst-off person?" Which is a very different question from "How does this improve certain people's lives?"

People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.

As it is the nature of a kite to devour little birds, so it is the nature of some minds to insult and tyrannize over little people; this being the means which they use to recompense themselves for their extreme servility and condescension to their superiors; for nothing can be more reasonable than that slaves and flatterers should exact the same taxes on all below them which they themselves pay to all above them.

You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you'll accomplish and nothing more.

S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter.

I also realise power is fleeting, it doesn't last forever in this career, so I want to make the most of it. I want to make the kinds of pictures that interest me, it's as simple as that. I've never done work for money ever. If your choices are based on grosses and the film doesn't do well, what does that mean? It leaves you with nothing.