Time & Perspective Quote by Terry Prachett

Pratchett lands the joke with the deadpan certainty of a man who’s read too many glossy safety brochures. The sentence starts in the comforting cadence of institutional reassurance - “eight years,” “taught me,” “every avenue” - then pulls the floor out with a punchline that isn’t really a punchline. “Buy a house on the next continent” is comic exaggeration, but it’s also the only rational response to a system whose failures are rare, catastrophic, and sold as impossible.

The intent is less anti-science than anti-complacency. Pratchett is skewering a particular kind of modern confidence: the bureaucratic performance of control. Nuclear power, more than most technologies, depends on public trust, and public trust is built through language that flattens uncertainty into checklists and protocols. His subtext is that the danger isn’t just radiation; it’s the mindset that treats “covered” as a synonym for “conquered.” When organizations proclaim absolute safety, they often reveal the limits of their imagination - and disasters love the edge cases we didn’t bother to picture.

Context matters: Pratchett is a novelist steeped in systems thinking, someone who makes institutions funny by showing how they fail in predictable human ways. The line echoes the postwar, post-accident cultural memory around nuclear risk: the gap between technical probability and lived dread. It works because it turns risk assessment into a moral intuition. If the people in charge sound certain, that’s your cue to locate the nearest ocean.