Harry Turtledove

“How am I?”

“Except for being a damn fool for wanting to do this in the first place, you’re healthy as a horse,” Freedman answered. “But if they disqualified every damn fool in the Navy, they’d have twenty-seven men left, and how would they win the war then?”

Nothing was worse than a battlefield. Nothing could be. He was convinced of that. The devil hadn't known how to run hell before he took a long look at a Great War battlefield.

And a pair of albatrosses glided along behind the Remembrance. They really did look almost big enough to land. He wondered what they thought of the great ship. Or were they too birdbrained to think at all?

But this was their home. Men came here only to fight. That being so, who really were the birdbrains here?

He didn't feel like a knight in shining armor. He was filthy and fleabitten and probably lousy again. If they would have put him on a train and shipped him home, he wouldn't even have turned around to wave good-bye. He was here because the Army told him to be here and would shoot him if he bailed out, not because he thought God willed it. God was bound to have better things to do with His time.

Security trumped productivity.

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

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.

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.”

“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.

Maybe’s a word that makes a lot of people sorry later.