American Empire: Blood and Iron

Of all the sins in this world, which is more unforgivable than the sin of not having enough money? None I can think of.

“God bless you, suh, for what you done there.”

“I don’t believe in God, anymore than I believe in Mother Goose,” Darrow said. “Foolish notion. But I do believe in justice, and you deserve that. Everyone deserves that.”

Some people had a vested interest in trouble. If it looked as if calm threatened to break out, people like that would do anything they could to thwart it.

A war is a disaster whether you win or you lose—it’s only a worse disaster if you lose.

That wasn’t even close to fair, and Sylvia knew it. But she’s already seen that political campaigns weren’t designed to be fair. They were designed to convince, by whatever means possible.

Flora wasn’t sure she liked that in the abstract; whom a man knew shouldn’t have mattered so much as what he knew. But that didn’t change reality one bit.

“That’s logical. That’s a rational,” Hosea Blackford said. “Politics, unfortunately, is neither.”

Some people, though—some people think yelling something loud enough makes it so.

“He lies. How can you trust a man who lies? You cannot. And any man who comes on the wireless and says, ‘I am going to tell you the truth’—well, what else can he be except a liar?”

“Your trouble, Major, is that you think people spell prosecute and convict the same way,” Moss said. “That’s not how it works. Even in military court, the defendant’s entitled to a fair shake.”

Beauty didn’t last. Brains did.

In a way, misery loves company. In another way, if everyone’s in trouble, nobody can help anybody else get out of it.

The Confederate States had been founded on the principle that change was a bad idea.

They eyed each other in perfect mutual incomprehension.

“God done made this happen. He kin make us come through it, too, so long as He take it in His mind He want to do dat.”

“Amen,” Athenaeus said. Scipio made himself nod. He didn’t want to seem out of place—seeming out of place was one of his greatest fears, because it was deadly dangerous. But if God had really wanted to do something about this disaster, couldn’t He have stopped it in the first place?

Early summer in Nashville made a good practice ground for hell.

The only happy people she saw coming out of the place were a young couple, the man carrying a crying baby. Maternity wards are different, Nellie thought as she went past them. I bet they’re the only place in a hospital where people win instead of losing.

“Sir, don’t you think Utah is a special case?”

“Every case has partisans who insist it is special,” Hoover answered. “I recognize none of them. I believe none of them. The same principles must apply throughout the United States.”

Anne saw his attention focus on her. It still wasn’t the look a man gave an attractive woman: more like the look a sniper gave a target.

You can’t get along with somebody who’s bound and determined not to get along with you.

Agnes might know what she was doing heading into this marriage, but he didn’t. He had no clue; marriage wasn’t part of the curriculum at West Point. Maybe it should be, he thought. It might not produce better officers, but was very likely to produce happier ones.

“Something wrong, sir?” Lieutenant Jenkins asked.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Morrell answered.

“What’s Guinness?” Hirskowitz asked Carsten.

“It’s what they make in Ireland instead of beer,” Sam said helpfully. “It’s black as fuel oil, and almost as thick. It tastes kind of burnt till you get used to it. After that, it’s not so bad.”

“Oh.” Hirskowitz weighed that. “Well, I’ll see. They make real beer, too?”

When he came up for air, he gasped, “You never kissed me like that before.”

“Well, you never asked me to marry you before, either,” Rita answered.

He laughed. They kissed again. Heart pounding, he asked, “What else don’t I know?”

“You’ll find out,” she said. “After the wedding.”

Proclaiming they had the answers was the easy part. Really having them, and making them work—that looked harder. That looked a hell of a lot harder to him. But some people would buy castles in the air because they were short of beans on the ground.

Anne took her own attractiveness so much for granted, a man who showed he wasn’t completely in her grasp often succeeded in piquing her interest by sheer contrariness.

Yes, I know I haven’t told you anything. No offense, Sis, but you like running people’s lives so much, you don’t like it when they try and run their own.

They wouldn’t understand no matter what, any more than they would understand what life in the trenches was like. Experience brought understanding. Nothing else came close.

He spent years alternately chasing her and trying—always without much luck—to get her out of his mind. Now that he’d finally got her, finally found out just how much woman she was, losing her was the last thing he wanted. But two had to say yes. One was plenty for no.

That held enough truth to be provocative, not enough to be useful.

He hated parliamentary procedure, but he’d started learning it anyhow, even if he did think it was only a way to cheat by the numbers.

“I don’t hide anything I aim to do; I just come right out and say it.” An alarm whistle went off in Anne’s head; any man who said something like that was almost bound to be lying.

She knew the sea too well ever to trust it.

Falling asleep in a corset was impressive proof of what exhaustion could do.

There’s no such thing as glory, near as I can tell. If the machine guns didn’t kill it, the artillery did.

Your deplorable taste in politics aside, you’re an intelligent man.

Soldiers don’t make policy. We only carry it out, and get blamed when it goes wrong.

“I’ll be all right,” Nellie said. “This is something God meant women to do.” And if that doesn’t prove God is a man, I don’t know what does.

He was still very young, young enough to believe in the tooth fairy, the common sense of Congress, and a great many other unlikelihoods.