Terry Pratchett Quotes

There is no one looking out for us. We are all alone.

But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits-a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

When I'm around animals, I don't pay attention to people.

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.

Lately he'd been seen going out less and less, becoming that strangest of animals in a small town: a loner.

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.

A human being is a naturally political [animal].

Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There's a conflict of dominant personalities. There's a group of ringleaders without a ring. There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.' The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

Many animal rescue organizations hit with a hard-core, heartbreaking message. Their videos and stories can become difficult for average people to watch. By taking a more positive, heartwarming approach to animal rescue, I've been able to engage people and keep them engaged for years. Instead of selling the agony and misery - and sadly, there is no shortage of that - I start with the happy endings. I work backwards so the first message they get is joy and success due to their involvement. Opening the mind with humor and joy gets the rescue message in that much deeper.

Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.

Trump is a little tone-deaf to the average American. He unveiled his slogan this week: 'Are you better off than you were four wives ago?'

Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon.

My daughters have strong personalities. I'm close to them but they don't really need me to advise them on how to manage their lives and they don't ask me to do that.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

Animals can seem more pure. Without complication, I mean, animals are selfless. What animals do for us, they do out of instinct.

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.

If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship to nature--even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe--has to change.

Wherefore the brain must be looked upon as the universal and general sensory and at the same time as the universal and general motory organ of the body and finally as the universal and general laboratory of the animal spirits and the blood or of the essential juices of life.

The obligations of law and equity reach only to mankind; but kindness and beneficence should be extended to the creatures of every species, and these will flow from the breast of a true man, as streams that issue from the living fountain.

Back when we were Neanderthals or whatever, we evolved to think along tribal lines. Survival was based on this idea of who are we and who are the others who will come and take our resources. I think it's an animal and a human thing that we all see in terms of us vs. them, and race is a very easy way to separate who is us and who is them.