Harry Turtledove

Security trumped productivity.

“These here is Army trucks—or trucks the gummint took from the Army,” Lucullus said. “Reckon they gonna be where there's sojers around. Ain’t got to worry ’bout thievin’ a whole hell of a lot.”

This time, Cincinnatus laughed. “Only shows what you know. You ain't never seen the kind o’ thievin’ that goes on around Army trucks. I know what I'm talkin’ about there—you’d best believe I do. You start loadin’ stuff in Army trucks, and some of it's gonna walk with Jesus. I don't care how many soldiers you got. I don't care how many guns you got, neither. Folks steal.”

You can only bend the long arm of coincidence so far before you break it.

The North American air war struck Potter as a duel with machine guns at a pace and a half.

If you call a thing by a name that doesn't seem so repellent, then the thing itself also becomes less repellent. Sympathetic magic—except it wasn't sympathetic to those who fell victim to it.

“Sorry you woke up while I was tendin’ to it.”

“Don't worry about that none,” his father said. “Got us plenty o’ more important things to worry about.” Cincinnatus wished he could have told him he was wrong. And he could have, too—but only if he were willing to lie.

Like any Vice President, Charlie La Follette was the very definition of an unknown quantity.

And now, just to prove how clever the elected rulers of the country were, they’d decided to reprise what hadn’t worked before.

“Every word you say is true,” O’Doull answered. “Every single word. But saying it, no matter how true it is, doesn't make anybody on either side change his mind.”

The Sandwich Islands. Home of perfect weather, sugar cane, pineapple, and women of several races wearing no more than the perfect weather required. Home of the ukulele, the instrument the Devil had invented when he was trying for the guitar.

“People tell me all kinds of things.” Dowling said. “Some of them are true. Some of them help make the flowers grow.”

But when he ached, when he panted, when the world was too much with him, Marx and revolution held a wild temptation. Like cheap booze for a drunk, he thought wearily, except revolutions make people do even stupider things.