Quotes About People

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.

William wondered why he always disliked people who said 'no offense meant.' Maybe it was because they found it easier to to say 'no offense meant' than actually to refrain from giving offense.

We're dealing here, said Vimes, With a twisted mind. Oh, no! You think so? Yes. But... no... you can't be right. Because Nobby was with us all the time. Not Nobby, said Vimes testily. Whatever he might do to a dragon, I doubt if he'd make it explode. There's stranger people in this world than Corporal Nobbs, my lad. Carrot's expression slid into a rictus of intrigued horror. Gosh, he said.

A witch who is bored might do ANYTHING. People said things like 'we had to make our own amusements in those days' as if this signified some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing.

Were you proposing to shoot these people in cold blood, sergeant? Nossir. Just a warning shot inna head, sir.

Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It's the other way around.

Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

The city's full of people who you just see around.

Odd thing, ain't it... you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.

They know that people need witches; they need the unofficial people who understand the difference between right and wrong, and when right is wrong and when wrong is right. The world needs the people who work around the edges. They need the people who can deal with the little bumps and inconveniences. And little problems. After all, we are almost all human. Almost all of the time.

People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.

He could think in italics . Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.

Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows -- sometimes it does not need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.

That's the way it was. Privilege, which just means 'private law.' Two types of people laugh at the law; those that break it and those that make it.

The theater troubled her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn't belong to her, one that wasn't in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn't belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn't know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.

Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE? 'Yes. Yes, of course.' Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.

People whose wishes get granted often don't turn out to be very nice people.

You had to deal every day with people who were foolish and lazy and untruthful and downright unpleasant, and you could certainly end up thinking that the world would be considerably improved if you gave them a slap.

Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.

That's the Ankh-Morpork instinct, Vimes thought. Run away, and then stop and see if anything interesting is going to happen to other people.

Hell needed horribly bright, self-centered people like Eric. They were much better at being nasty than demons could ever manage