We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on society's success in prolonging life while neglecting the concept of dying gracefully.
Terry Pratchett's quote highlights the paradox of modern life, where advancements in medicine and technology have granted us longer lives but have simultaneously led us to overlook the natural process of dying. It suggests that as a society, we may be unprepared for death, particularly as aging populations face harsh realities about their mortality and the quality of their lives in their twilight years.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the ethics of prolonging life through medical interventions.
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.
It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
The concept of God in America is very different than it is in England. Because we see the horrendous outcome of religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked by a gang of psychopaths and bullies and homophobes, and the name of God has been used for their own twisted agendas.
I am neither male nor female, nor am I sexless. I am the Peaceful One, whose form is self-effulgent, powerful radiance.
A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.
Fierce national competition over water resources has prompted fears that water issues contain the seeds of violent conflict.
Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
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