Harry Turtledove

Isaac might have been emboldened by the whiskey, for he asked Yossel Reisen, “What—is it like at the front?” Emboldened or not, he sounded hesitant.

Yossel looked into the depths of his glass as he had looked through Flora. At last, he answered, “Think of all the worst things you know in the world. Think of them all in one place. Think of them as ten times as bad as they really are. Then think of them ten times worse than that. What you are thinking about when you do that is one ten-thousandth of what the front is like.”

Nobody asked him any more questions.

“Putting the best face on things doesn’t make them right,” Flora said with a stern rectitude of a temperance crusader smashing a bottle of whiskey against a saloon wall.

He’d always been glad he wasn’t an infantryman: if you were a mudfoot, war, and the death and the maiming that went with war, were random and impersonal. What had he just been doing but dealing out random, impersonal death? He thought of himself as a knight in shining armor. What sorts of filthy things had knights done that never got into the pages of Malory and Ivanhoe? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out, not really.

He looked down at himself. His imaginary suit of armor seemed to have a patch or two of rust on it. No matter who you were or what you did, you couldn’t stay immaculate, not in this war.

“You notice he does not do anything about it. The first amendment to the Constitution protects our right to speak freely.” He let out a chuckle the wind flung away. “The first amendment also protects his right to speak freely, however distasteful I find his opinion.”

The ability to see what is, sir, is essential for the leader of a great nation.

He was a pretty fair officer, no doubt about it, but he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.

Of course, when you got right down to it, who was?

Any time you could split the difference between what you really wanted and what you would settle for, you weren’t doing too bad.

When Cassius was optimistic about the way the fighting was going, he was often wrong; when he was pessimistic, he was always right.

When war reached out its hand, what did wealth and power matter? A fool with a gun could take them away. A fool with a gun had just taken them away.

“How come they get to call us names whenever they please and we don’t get to call them names whenever we please? That’s not fair.”

“Because they have more guns than we do, and they drove our soldiers out of this part of the country,” he told her. “If you have more guns in a war, you get to say what’s fair.”

But destroying white privilege only boosted white fear.

A low murmur came from his audience, more frightening in its way than the fury they had shown before. Fury didn’t last. Now Lincoln was making them think. Thought was slower than anger to flower into action, but it was a hardy perennial. It did not bloom and die.