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That wasn’t even remotely fair, but politics wasn’t about being fair. Politics was about getting your guy in and keeping the other side’s guy out. Once you’d done that, you could do all the other neat stuff you had in mind. If you stood on the sidelines looking longingly toward the playing field, all the neat ideas in the world weren’t worth a dime.

Pound saw problems and solutions with an almost vicious clarity. As far as he was concerned, everything was simple. And damned if watching him in action didn’t make you wonder whether he had it right and everybody else looked at the world through a kaleidoscope that made everything seem much more complicated than it should have.

In war, proving the other guy was wrong often meant proving he had no business breathing.

“Is it better to get shot in a war your side wins than in one where you lose?” O’Doull persisted.

“Better not to get shot at all,” McDougald said, a great and obvious truth to which too many people who went down in history as statesmen were blind.

Yes, they’d learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn’t matter. That you learned them did.

That was true, but, like a lot of true things, didn’t tell the whole story or even most of it.

“I’m not afraid,” Edith said. “God will watch over all of us. I know He’s on our side.” Everybody in every war since the world began was convinced God was on his side. Half the people in every war since the world began ended up being wrong.

I’ve always tried to be a rational man. I don’t have much use for the idea of miracles. Things are what they are, that’s all.

Well, what was life but the difference between what you planned and what you got?

“Sinner!” Selfe said again. “Even the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.”

“No doubt,” Dowling said. “Which of us do you suppose he’s speaking through? And how do you aim to prove it one way or the other?”

“You may not care about famous, buddy, but famous is gonna care about you,” the photographer predicted.

“Did anybody know what a nasty war this would be before they went and started it?”

“Does anybody ever?”