London is a roost for every bird.

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

Traditions are a common part of our lives. They can be good, and not all traditions are wrong, but sometimes they can take the joy out of life.

Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

Britishness is just a way of putting things together and a certain don’t care attitude about clothes. You don’t care, you just do it and it looks great.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It’s gossip.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

Every time I come to Europe, I’m just as excited as I was my very first time, which was many, many years ago. I love that part of the world, and I especially love the fans.

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‚among the most unspeakable crimes in history.‘ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

When my ancestors came from Africa, they were shackled by our neck, our wrists, and our ankles in steel chains. I’ve turned those steel chains into gold to symbolize the fact that I’m still a slave, only my price tag is higher.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

Travel teaches toleration.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Let’s teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe.

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.

History is more or less bunk.

Say ‚Toronto‘ or ‚Ontario,‘ and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

Even in this globalised world, London is still the standard for our times. The city has embraced the world’s diversity and represents the finest in human achievements.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible that in any profane history.

I feel Anglo-American.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

Hawaii is paradise. It sounds cheesy to say it, but there’s music in the air there.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

I mean, Hawaii is beautiful, but the world is full of beautiful places.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

I’m never in the same place for more than, like, three days at a time. Things can change from one minute to the next.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

To recruit staff, I traveled all over the country talking with people who had been working on one or another aspect of the atomic-energy enterprise and people in radar work, for example, and underwater sound, telling them about the job, the place that we are going to, and enlisting their enthusiasm.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.