Harry Turtledove

Reverend Selfe glowered. He was good at glowering. His physiognomy gave him a head start, but he had talent, too.

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.

Poffenberger eyed Pound the way a man wearing a suit made of pork chops might eye a nearby bear.

A man of strong opinions but limited vocabulary, O’Doull thought.

Like other lower forms of life, second lieutenants were too dumb to know better.

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.