In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?
Interpretation
This quote humorously highlights the practical considerations of work and compensation.
Terry Pratchett's quote reflects a blend of philosophical inquiry and humor by referencing Sceptum, who questions the financial rewards for work. It suggests that while lofty ideas and professions might sound noble, the reality often hinges on the more mundane concern of whether one will be compensated for their efforts.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of being practical in one's career choices.
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.
I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.
Commuter - one who spends his life In riding to and from his wife; A man who shaves and takes a train And then rides back to shave again.
Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.
If you can't laugh at yourself, then how can you laugh at anybody else? I think people see the human side of you when you do that.
I can't afford to die; I'd lose too much money.
...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.
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