Quotes on Small Gods

You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.

Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course.

Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races... very handy.

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

Sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.

There’s no point in believing in things that exist.

The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.

Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.

The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.

The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god).

Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

Words are the litmus paper of the mind.

What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.