"It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing"
About this Quote
Mischief is the engine here, but it’s principled mischief: Pratchett takes the cozy self-help notion of “do what matters” and spikes it with a heretic’s grin. The line flatters action that creates friction. If nobody objects, it implies, you’re probably just polishing the furniture of the status quo.
The intent isn’t to romanticize contrarianism for its own sake; it’s to point at power. “Someone, somewhere” is doing quiet work in the sentence: it widens the field from personal nemeses to systems, norms, bureaucracies, and polite consensus. Opposition becomes a diagnostic tool. If your work triggers discomfort, it may be because you’ve wandered into territory someone has claimed - or because you’ve exposed a rule that survives mainly by never being named.
Pratchett’s subtext is classic Discworld: moral seriousness smuggled in under comedy. His protagonists are rarely pure revolutionaries; they’re watchmen, witches, civil servants of the uncanny - people who see how institutions launder cruelty into procedure. So the line reads less like “be rebellious” and more like “test your ethics against resistance.” It’s a dare to do the unglamorous kinds of courage: telling the truth in rooms that prefer a story, making art that punctures pieties, insisting on dignity where it’s been bureaucratically misfiled.
Context matters, too. Pratchett wrote in a late-20th-century Britain steeped in managerial language and culture-war taboos, where “common sense” often meant “don’t make trouble.” His joke lands because it identifies troublemaking as a civic virtue - not because conflict is fun, but because silence is how bad arrangements keep their good manners.
The intent isn’t to romanticize contrarianism for its own sake; it’s to point at power. “Someone, somewhere” is doing quiet work in the sentence: it widens the field from personal nemeses to systems, norms, bureaucracies, and polite consensus. Opposition becomes a diagnostic tool. If your work triggers discomfort, it may be because you’ve wandered into territory someone has claimed - or because you’ve exposed a rule that survives mainly by never being named.
Pratchett’s subtext is classic Discworld: moral seriousness smuggled in under comedy. His protagonists are rarely pure revolutionaries; they’re watchmen, witches, civil servants of the uncanny - people who see how institutions launder cruelty into procedure. So the line reads less like “be rebellious” and more like “test your ethics against resistance.” It’s a dare to do the unglamorous kinds of courage: telling the truth in rooms that prefer a story, making art that punctures pieties, insisting on dignity where it’s been bureaucratically misfiled.
Context matters, too. Pratchett wrote in a late-20th-century Britain steeped in managerial language and culture-war taboos, where “common sense” often meant “don’t make trouble.” His joke lands because it identifies troublemaking as a civic virtue - not because conflict is fun, but because silence is how bad arrangements keep their good manners.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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