People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
Interpretation
True holiness requires the experience of wrongdoing.
In this quote, Terry Pratchett suggests that to understand the concept of holiness, one must first experience the opposite—wickedness. It implies that the struggle between good and evil is essential for personal growth and moral understanding, as facing one's darker side can lead to a deeper appreciation for righteousness and virtue.
In practice
This quote would be fitting in a discussion about morality in a philosophy class.
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.
A government is like fire, a handy servant, but a dangerous master.
Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
Allah knows exactly what to give you to help you return to Him. The events in your life are purposeful, appropriate & non-random.
If your busy with yourself now, you will be busy with yourself then. If you are busy with Allah now, you will be with Him then.
Yet this is trash that the Church imposes upon the world as the Word of God; this is the collection of lies and contradictions called the Holy Bible! This is the rubbish called Revealed Religion!
Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.
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