American Empire: The Victorious Opposition

As happened too often in politics, never turned out not to be so very long after all.

Only two promotions really mattered: the one up from buck private and the one to general’s rank.

Everyone marched everywhere at Fort Custer. Armstrong had begun to think Thou shalt march' was in the Bible somewhere right below Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain''—two commandments he was learning more about violating every day.

“Sir, you have been poking your nose into matters that do not concern you,” Abell said. “We discourage that.”

We? You have a tapeworm? Dowling wondered.

You kill everybody who doesn’t want to see reason, people will get mighty thin on the ground mighty fast.

“Death is never dignified.” O’Doull spoke with a doctor’s certainty. “Never. Dignity in death is something we invent afterwards to make the living feel better.”

The party and the CSA could get by without a lot of fellows who brought only fanaticism. Losing somebody with brains would have hurt much more. Brains were harder to come by.

Manicheism, n., The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.

He’d escaped the last dragnet as much by luck as by anything else. You could tell a man not to be stupid, and maybe—if he wasn’t stupid to begin with—he’d listen. But how the devil could you tell a man not to be unlucky?

Peacetime, though, felt like summertime. Even as you enjoyed it, you knew it wouldn’t last.

But, as often happened, the official and the real had only a nodding acquaintance with each other.

She hated the calendar, hated the mirror and what it showed her every morning. A handsome woman, that’s what you are. She would almost rather have been ugly. Then she wouldn’t have to remember the beauty she had been not so long ago.

You can have as much fun in a library as you can at the cinema, and it doesn’t cost you anything.

“Hoover is one of the best men we’ve ever had for getting things done,” David said, “and one of the worst for figuring out what to do.”

Maybe not thinking about the price of failure was what marked a hero. On the other hand, maybe it just marked a damn fool.

“You see?” he said. “You just wanted me to tell you I was wrong.”

“Well, of course,” Anne answered, and poked him in the ribs. “What else does a woman want to hear from a man?”

“How about, ‘I love you’? How about, ‘You’re beautiful’?” Potter suggested.

“Those are nice, too,” she agreed with a smile. “As far as I’m concerned, though, nothing’s better than, ‘You were right.’”

Like a lot of jailers, he was convinced the police who hunted down criminals couldn’t find a skunk if it was spraying their leg.

“They can’t say anything against the government, not in public they can’t.”

“Is it a country or a jail?” Carsten asked.

“Near as I can tell, sir,” the second yeoman said, “it’s a jail.”