Harry Turtledove

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.”

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.

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.