Hogfather Quotes

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

“Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.”

“There is always time for another last minute.”

“This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, “Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it’s all true you’ll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn’t then you’ve lost nothing, right?” When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks.”

“They wonder how the snow plough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.”

“Do I detect a note of unseasonal grumpiness? No sugar piggywiggy for you, Albert.”

“Real children do not go hoppity skip unless they are on drugs.”

“They always gives me bath salts,” complained Nobby. “And bath soap and bubble bath and herbal bath lumps and tons of bath stuff and I can’t think why, ‘cos it’s not as if I hardly ever has a bath. You’d think they’d take the hint, wouldn’t you?”

“She’d become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do.”

“Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvelous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.”

“Some things are fairly obvious when it’s a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them.”

“Susan says, don’t get afraid, get angry.”

“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”

“She’d sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she’d beat herself to death with her own umbrella.”

“Hello, inner child, I’m the inner babysitter!”

“Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.”

“Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things.”

“And then Jack chopped down what was the world’s last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant’s children didn’t have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.”

“The phrase ‘Someone ought to do something’ was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider ‘and that someone is me’.”

“It’s amazing how good governments are, given their track records in almost every other field, at hushing up things like alien encounters. One reason may be that the aliens themselves are too embarrassed to talk about it.”