Harry Turtledove

The roll of the dice, the turn of the card…Some guys had a shell burst ten feet away from them and didn’t get badly hurt. Some turned into hamburger. Who could say why? God, maybe. From everything Jorge had seen, He had a rugged sense of humor.

Potter knew perfectly well that it was true. He also knew that what was true and what made good propaganda often had not even a nodding acquaintance with each other.

“Half of being smart is knowing what you’re not smart at,” Jake said. “Plenty of folks reckon that ’cause they know something, they know everything. And that ain’t the way it works.”

“I never said it was,” Goldman answered primly.

“Yeah, I know,” Jake said. “You make one.”

“We sure is crazy,” someone would say. “If you ain’t crazy in dis here place, you gots to be nuts.”

Life was what you got, not what you expected.

In a poker game, you were either a shark or you were bait.

You couldn’t find an answer if you didn’t know you should be asking the question.

“Oderint dum metuant,” O’Doull murmured….

“But it means, ‘let them hate, as long as they fear.’”

“Three words,” McDougald said admiringly. “Boy, that packs more into three words than anything this side of ‘I love you.’”

The desire not to look bad before one’s fellow man is a strange, compelling, and terribly powerful thing.

When three men plot, one is a fool and two are government spies.

Because he didn’t much care whether he won or lost, he had a terrific poker face. “Nobody can tell what you’re thinking,” one of the other guys in the game grumbled.

“Me? I gave up thinking for Lent,” Chester said. Everybody sitting around the table laughed.

He’d got good at the bureaucratic infighting, too, the sort of quiet warfare that measured itself as much by things prevented as by those accomplished.