Guards! Guards! (Discworld, #8)

by Terry Pratchett

Its eyes were the size of very large eyes,

“Wouldn’t work with dragons,” said Lady Ramkin. “Some daft creature rolls on its back, you disembowel it. That’s how they look at it. Almost human, really.”

and here he felt the dragon’s genuine astonishment—of some of the less commendable areas of human history, which were most of it.

“If you’d thought,” added the captain sarcastically, “you’d have thought that the king is hardly going to want other dragons dead, is he? They’re probably distant relatives or something. I mean, it wouldn’t want us to go around killing its own kind, would it?” “Well, sir, people do, sir,” said the guard sulkily. “Ah, well,” said the captain. “That’s different.” He tapped the side of his helmet meaningfully. “That’s ’cos we’re intelligent.”