‘How does it work, then?’
‘Oh, I didn’t understand what he said. It was all about ... numbers. But it certainly sounded very clever.’ (MR)
Complete collection of Terry Pratchett quotes by subject and cross-referenced
‘It’s very ingenious.’
‘How does it work, then?’ ‘Oh, I didn’t understand what he said. It was all about ... numbers. But it certainly sounded very clever.’ (MR)
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'If they were very intelligent they would not be heroes.' (LH)
'... what mouse don't we want to be like?' Darktan demanded.
'We don't want to be like the first mouse!' shouted the rats. 'Right! What mouse do we want to be like?' 'The second mouse, Darktan!' said the rats, who'd had this lesson dinned into them many times. 'Right! And why do we want to be like the second mouse?' 'Because the second mouse gets the cheese, Darktan!' (AM) It often seemed to him that Leonard, who had pushed intellect into hitherto undiscovered uplands, had discovered there large and specialised pockets of stupidity. (FE)
... you cannot switch cunning off when you want to ... (Do)
'Intelligence is like legs - too many and you trip yourself up.' (LC)
Cunning in younger wizards is not automatically applauded in their elders. (DW)
... while they had no great intelligence that had accumulated that mass of observations, experience, cynicism and memory that can pass for wisdom among people who don't know any better. (TG)
... men who can invent things anyone could have thought of are very rare men. (LH)
... the intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it. (J)
Detritus's intelligence wasn't too bad for a troll, falling somewhere between a cuttlefish and a line-dancer, but you could rely on him not to let it slow him down. (J)
He was known to Ankh-Morpork's professional underclass as a thoughtful, patient man, and considered something of an intellectual because some of his tattoos were spelled right. (H)
Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time. (SM)
... she was brilliant in the same way that a diamond is brilliant, all edges and chilliness. (SM)
Dogs were brighter than wolves. Wolves didn't need intelligence. They had other things. But dogs ... they'd been given intelligence by humans. Whether they wanted it or not. They were certainly more vicious than wolves. They'd got that from humans too. (MA)
Gods never need to be very bright when there are humans around to be it for them. (SG)
Didactylos’s thoughts chased after one another with a whooshing noise. No wonder he was bald. Hair would have burned off from the inside. (SG)
‘You are smart enough to be extremely good, but not impossibly good. Even a very observant and highly sceptical witness can go away from the show believing he has seen through your tricks, and feeling pleasantly self-satisfied as a result, while understanding nothing of the reality of your abilities.’ (LU)
He’d told her all about parallel processing, a concept she hadn’t heard of before her reincarnation. This meant running more than one task at once, or breaking down one big job into smaller jobs to be handled simultaneously. Not that she was particularly impressed. After all, she had been doing that all her life, thinking about making dinner while also blowing noses and teaching disturbed children how to hold a conversation and composing another angry letter to the bishop, with the occasional prayer thrown in the mix. Who didn’t have to work that way, every day of a busy life? (LM)
… Lobsang was trying to apprehend the whole world, the whole universe and trying to understand the role of the human race in that universe.
Despite all that, Lobsang appeared to be sane …. (LM) Camels are far too intelligent to admit to being intelligent. (MP)
Hell needed horribly bright, self-centred people like Eric. They were much better at being nasty than demons could ever manage. (E)
This cat, on the other hand, was its own animal. All cats give that impression, of course, but instead of the mindless animal self-absorption that passes for secret wisdom in the creatures, Greebo radiated genuine intelligence. He also radiated a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox. (WS)
… stupid clever people do much more damage than stupid untutored morons (JD)
Only a mile away from the shepherd and his flock was a goatherd and his herd. 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. (SG) |
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