Nicole

“Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident. He’d take the whining resentful ones, the ones with a bellyful of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could make it big if only they’d been given the chance. Give him the ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and lowgrade paranoia. And stupidity, too. They’ve all sworn the oath, he thought, but not a man jack of ’em has even asked what a figgin is.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“It is said that the gods play games with the lives of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are - who knows?
Best not to speculate.
Thunder rolled...
It rolled a six.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“It was the usual Ankh-Morpork mob in times of crisis; half of them were here to complain, a quarter of them were here to watch the other half, and the remainder were here to rob, importune or sell hot-dogs to the rest.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“I'm afraid they're not very well-designed creatures, dragons."
Vimes listened.
"They would never have survived at all except that their home swamps were isolated and short of predators. Not that a dragon made good eating,
anyway-once you'd taken away the leathery skin and the enormous flight muscles, what was left must have been like biting into a badly-run chemical factory. No wonder dragons were always ill. They relied on permanent stomach trouble for supplies of fuel. Most of their brain power was taken up with controlling the complexities of then-digestion, which could distill flame-producing fuels from the most unlikely ingredients. They could even rearrange their internal plumbing overnight to deal with difficult processes. They lived on a chemical knife-edge the whole time. One misplaced hiccup and they were geography.
And when it came to choosing nesting sites, the females had all the common sense and mothering instinct of a brick."
Vimes wondered why people had been so worried about dragons in the olden days. If there was one in a cave near you, all you had to do was wait until it self-ignited, blew itself up, or died of acute indigestion.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!