Last hopeless chances have got to work. Nothing makes sense otherwise. You might as well not be alive.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of hope and the fundamental need for it in life.
Terry Pratchett's quote highlights the significance of hope in human existence, suggesting that without the belief in the possibility of a positive outcome, life may feel meaningless. It implies that even when facing desperate situations, having 'last hopeless chances' is essential for a sense of purpose and vitality.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity, this quote could be used to inspire hope.
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.
Frege has the merit of ... finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical.
Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.
We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.
A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
The ego doesn't know that the source of all energy is within you, so it seeks it outside.
Inanimate objects are always correct and cannot, unfortunately, be reproached with anything. I have never observed a chair shift from one foot to another, or a bed rear on its hind legs. And tables, even when they are tired, will not dare to bend their knees. I suspect that objects do this from pedagogical considerations, to reprove us constantly for our instability.
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