You have to start out learning to believe the little lies. "So we can believe the big ones?" Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Interpretation
Believing in small lies is essential for accepting greater truths and values such as justice and mercy.
In this quote by Terry Pratchett, he suggests that understanding and accepting minor falsehoods is a necessary step towards recognizing and believing in larger, more complex ideals such as justice, mercy, and duty. The implication is that our perception of reality often requires us to navigate through layers of deception in order to grasp the larger truths that underpin our moral and ethical frameworks.
In practice
In a discussion about moral philosophy, this quote can be used to illustrate how society often accepts certain social norms.
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.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
When we are thirsty, we drink the white waters of the pool, the sweetness of our mournful childhood.
Ambition, and Covetousnesse are Passions that are perpetually incumbent, and pressing.
The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.
For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.
Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
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