Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,' the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.
Interpretation
This quote highlights humanity's curiosity and tendency to push boundaries, even when warned against it.
Terry Pratchett's quote reflects on the innate human desire to explore the unknown and test the limits, suggesting that people are often driven by curiosity, sometimes recklessly so. The imagery of a 'End-of-the-World Switch' serves as a metaphor for the dangers of our curiosity and the power of temptation, indicating that when faced with a forbidden option, many would be unable to resist the urge to find out what would happen.
In practice
In a discussion about human behavior, one might quote this to illustrate our instinct to explore limits.
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.
Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.
So you know how things stand. Now forget what they think of you. Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don't let anything distract you. You've wandered all over and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.
The purpose of prayer is emphatically not to bend God's will to ours, but rather to align our will to his.
It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.
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