Harry Turtledove

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.

“You’re still learning the difference between being an agitator and being a politician. Listen to me, Flora.” He sounded very earnest. “Compromise is not a dirty word.”

“Maybe it should be,” she answered.

“Pretty damn soon, the Rebs’ll pack it in here, too, I expect,” Carlton said.

“Every blasphemy that passes your lips means a hotter dose of hellfire in the world to come,” McSweeney answered.”

I’ve seen enough hellfire right here on earth,” Carlton said. “The kind of the preachers go on about don’t worry me as much as it used to.”

You have a fine stump speech there, Congresswoman, and I think you are sincere in it, but it doesn’t altogether match the way the world works.

Anytime a politician said he wouldn’t beat around the bush, you were well advised to keep your hand on your wallet.

“The War Department has all sorts of opinions,” he said, sneering as he had when Dowling announced the Roosevelt was there. “A few of them bear a discernible relation to the real world—but only a few, mind you.”

Whites are so mystified, they put race ahead of class.

“What’s obvious,” Morrell observed, “isn’t always true.”

When you lose, Sis, the last war’s never over and done with.