Life & Wisdom Quote by Terry Pratchett

Pratchett lands the line like a friendly punch: a joke that turns, mid-laugh, into a moral. "Sooner or later we're all someone's dog" sounds like a throwaway gag about loyalty and leash-walking, but its bite is aimed at the fantasy of pure independence. Dogs are adored, fed, praised, and also owned. The sentence holds those two truths in the same palm, refusing to let you keep only the comforting half.

The intent is Pratchett at full operating temperature: using the homely and the comic to smuggle in a bleak, accurate observation about power. You can be competent, clever, even heroic, and still wind up answering to a patron, a boss, a state, a lover, a public. The "sooner or later" matters: it punctures the ego with time. Nobody stays the master of their own story forever; age, need, debt, and desire make dependents of us all.

Subtextually, it also flips the usual insult ("treated like a dog") into something more complicated. Being "someone's dog" can mean exploitation, yes, but it can also mean belonging, being chosen, being protected. Pratchett's work loves institutions when they're humane and hates them when they're smug; this line keeps both possibilities alive, warning you to watch who holds the leash and why you keep returning to their hand.

In the context of Pratchett's broader satire, it's a miniature of his recurring theme: civilization runs less on grand ideals than on messy arrangements of care and control. The joke isn't that humans are animals. It's that our dignity is negotiated, daily, in ordinary dependencies.