Harry Turtledove Quotes

The countryside looked as if hell had been there, but had gone away on vacation.

If you started thinking the whole world was like the part of it where you lived, you were going to be wrong a lot of the time.

That was something else war was about: not caring.

He’d always been glad he wasn’t an infantryman: if you were a mudfoot, war, and the death and the maiming that went with war, were random and impersonal. What had he just been doing but dealing out random, impersonal death? He thought of himself as a knight in shining armor. What sorts of filthy things had knights done that never got into the pages of Malory and Ivanhoe? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out, not really.
He looked down at himself. His imaginary suit of armor seemed to have a patch or two of rust on it. No matter who you were or what you did, you couldn’t stay immaculate, not in this war.

At sixteen, you knew you could do the impossible.
At forty-three, you knew damn well you couldn’t.

“What is the younger generation coming to?” she exclaimed: the cry of the older generation throughout recorded history.

What should matter and what does matter, monsieur, are not one and the same thing, I regret to say.

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

“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.

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?

The ability to see what is, sir, is essential for the leader of a great nation.

You notice he does not do anything about it. The first amendment to the Constitution protects our right to speak freely." He let out a chuckle the wind flung away. "The first amendment also protects his right to speak freely, however distasteful I find his opinion.

An idea may be a good one no matter who propounds it.

Radicals hire bomb-throwing maniacs. Rich men hire lawyers. They’re more expensive, but they ought to be, because they do more damage.

But, aside from that grumbling, without which they would hardly have been soldiers, they went where they were ordered.