'You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.'

The footman, recognizing instantly the boundless bad manners of the well-bred, backed away quickly.

"But the point is... the point is... the point is we've not been experienced for a lot longer than you."
"We've got a lot of experience of not having any experience," said Nanny Ogg happily.

The only way housework could be done in this place was with a shovel or, for preference, a match.

People didn't hit you over the head with farmhouses back home.
Nanny Ogg gets homesick.

Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government.
Local-body politics explained.

'Baths is unhygienic,' Granny declared. 'You know I've never agreed with baths. Sittin' around in your own dirt like that.'
Taking personal hygiene to new limits.

Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because -- what with trolls and dwarfs and so on -- speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.

Nanny Ogg quite liked cooking, provided there were other people around to do things like chop up the vegetables and wash the dishes afterwards.
Home Pragmatics.

'Emberella,' thought Magrat. 'I'm fairy godmothering a girl who sounds like something you put up in the rain.'

Magrat was annoyed. She was also frightened, which made her even more annoyed. It was hard for people when Magrat was annoyed. It was like being attacked by damp tissue.

Nanny Ogg looked him up and down or, at least, down and further down. 'You're a dwarf,' she said.
Nanny Ogg meets Casanunda.

She had buried three husbands, and at least two of them had been already dead.

Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy Seriph of Al-Ybi was cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Ybi are renowned for being remarkably short and bad-tempered.

Greebo's technique was unscientific and wouldn't have stood a chance against any decent swordmanship, but on his side was the fact that it is almost impossible to develop decent swordmanship when you seem to have run into a food mixer that is biting your ear off.

The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and a burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.

He looked up at the witches with the expression of a drowning man looking at a drink of water.

Despite many threats, Granny Weatherwax had never turned anyone into a frog. The way she saw it, there was a technically less cruel but cheaper and much more satisfying thing you could do. You could leave them human and make them think they were a frog, which also provided much innocent entertainment for passers-by.
Headology in action.

"We're the kind that gives people what they know they really need, not what we think they ought to want."
Real witches.

She was not someone to use extreme language, but it was possible to be sure that when she deployed a mild term like 'a bee in her bonnet', she was using it to define someone whom she believed to be several miles over the madness horizon, and accelerating.

...and instead of getting on with proper science...
[ footnote: Like finding that bloody butterfly whose flapping wings cause all these storms we've been getting lately and getting it to stop. ]
The Quantum Weather Butterfly (or papilio tempestae).

Nanny Ogg [...] had a tendency to come out with what Magrat thought of as double-intenders, although in Nanny Ogg's case they were generally single entendres, and proud of it.

"Didn't have to", said Nanny happily. "An off-the-shoulder dress did the trick most of the time."
"Right off the shoulder and on to the grass, as I recall", said Granny.

Cats are like witches. They don't fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference. There's no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won't know they've lost, and to be a real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows it. There's no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure.

"But all the rest of 'em are six foot tall and you're ... of the shorter persuasion."
"I lied about my height, Mrs Ogg."
How Casanunda joined the palace guard.

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