Harry Turtledove Quotes

He lies. How can you trust a man who lies? You cannot. And any man who comes on the wireless and says, ‘I am going to tell you the truth’—well, what else can he be except a liar?

Whenever you throw away what’s right for what’s convenient, you end up losing both.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. Its glory is all moonshine.

A horsefly can't do a horse much real damage, but it can drive it wild anyhow.

When he came up for air, he gasped, “You never kissed me like that before.”
“Well, you never asked me to marry you before, either,” Rita answered.
He laughed. They kissed again. Heart pounding, he asked, “What else don’t I know?”
“You’ll find out,” she said. “After the wedding.”

But no line of ferocious, lean-faced, swarthy Spaniards appeared. Shouts and cries and the harsh snarl of gunfire suggested the dons were busy, desperately busy, elsewhere in London. When chance swept Shakespeare and Richard Burbage together for a moment, the player said, "Belike they'll make a stand at the tower." "Likely so," Shakespeare agreed unhappily. Those frowning walls had been made to hold back an army, and this... thing he was a part of was anything but. Up Tower Hill, where he'd watched the auto de fe almost a year before. A great roar, a roar full of triumph, rose from the men in front of him as they passed the crest of the hill and swept on towards the Tower Ditch and the walls beyond. And when Shakespeare crested the hill himself, he looked ahead and roared too, in joy and amazement and suddenly flaring hope. Will Kemp had been right, right and more than right. All the gates to the Tower of London stood open.

Liv worried less about how important other people thought she was and more about things that really mattered.

“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.

"If it works, he'll take the credit," Bokov warned once they were safely outside NKVD headquarters. "Oh, sure," Shteinberg agreed. "But he'd do that anyway." Bokov laughed, not that his superior was joking- or wrong.

"And what sort of country shall you build upon that watchword, General?" Lord Lyons asked. "You cannot be left entirely alone; you are become, as I said, a member of the family of nations. Further, this war has been hard on you. Much of your land has been ravaged or overrun, and in those places where the Federal army has been, slavery lies dying. Shall you restore it there at the point of a bayonet? Gladstone said October before last, perhaps a bit prematurely, that your Jefferson Davis had made an army, the beginnings of a navy, and, more important than either, a nation. You Southerners may have made the Confederacy into a nation, General Lee, but what sort of nation shall it be?" Lee did not answer for most of a minute. This pudgy little man in his comfortable chair had put into a nutshell his own worries and fears. He'd had scant time to dwell on them, not with the war always uppermost in his thoughts. But the war had not invalidated any of the British minister's questions- some of which Lincoln had also asked- only put off the time at which they would have to be answered. Now that time drew near. Now that the Confederacy was a nation, what sort of nation would it be? At last he said, "Your excellency, at this precise instant I cannot fully answer you, save to say that, whatever sort of nation we become, it shall be one of our own choosing." It was a good answer. Lord Lyons nodded, as if in thoughtful approval. Then Lee remembered the Rivington men. They too had their ideas on what the Confederate States of America should become.

They can't say anything against the government, not in public they can't." "Is it a country or a jail?" Carsten asked. "Near as I can tell, sir," the second yeoman said, "it's a jail.

Why do we have such a pack of confounded dunderheads running this country?" "My theory used to be that we get the government we deserve," Sam said. "Bad as we are, though, I don't think we're that bad. Right now, I'm taking a long look at the notion that God hates us.

He was still very young, young enough to believe in the tooth fairy, the common sense of Congress, and a great many other unlikelihoods.

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?

“By God, you are a hateful man!”
“Anyone who tells you anything you don’t want to hear is a hateful man,” Hamnet answered.