Harry Turtledove Quotes

The paper was shipped up from the USA, and full of lies; since the demise of the Rosenfeld Register (which had been only half full of lies), no local paper had been permitted. But even lies could be interesting if they were new lies: why else did people read so many books and magazines?

You can have as much fun in a library as you can at the cinema, and it doesn’t cost you anything.

How many Mormons are polygamists, truly?" Lincoln asked. "They write all sorts of things in the eastern papers." "They say all sorts of things here, too," Hamilton answered. "The truth is devilish hard to find, and they don't keep any public records of marriages past the first, which makes it harder yet. I'd say it's about one in ten, if that, but the polygamists have influence beyond their numbers. If you're going to support more than one wife and family, you need more than the common run of money, you see." "Oh, yes," Lincoln said. "A case similar to that of slaveholders in the Confederate States.

He thought she was the most wonderful woman in the world. Of course he did—she agreed with him.

Hoover is one of the best men we've ever had for getting things done," David said, "and one of the worst for figuring out what to do.

The Confederate States had been founded on the principle that change was a bad idea.

But, as often happened, the official and the real had only a nodding acquaintance with each other.

Dying Boudicca managed a feeble nod, and sent her last words out to a breathlessly silent Theatre:
"E'en so; 'Tis true. Oh!- I feel the poison!
We Britons never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when we do first help to wound ourselves,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue,
If Britons to themselves do rest but true."
She fell back and lay dead. Shakespeare strode forward, to the very front of the stage. Into more silence, punctuated only by sobs, he said,
"No epilogue here, unless you make it;
If you want your freedom, go and take it."

But destroying white privilege only boosted white fear.

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

"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.

That's logical. That's a rational," Hosea Blackford said. "Politics, unfortunately, is neither.

She was only eight years old, and still confused the way things should have been with the way they were.

Any time you could split the difference between what you really wanted and what you would settle for, you weren’t doing too bad.

Like South Carolina, Utah is too large to be an insane asylum and too small to make a nation, and, unlike South Carolina, lacks other nearby states full of zanies to join her in her madness.