Harry Turtledove Quotes

For some idiot reason, the idea of going into the drink with a misspelled safety device weirded Bryce out.

Bealeton. Another sleepy hamlet was about to have its name written down in history in letters of blood.

Beautiful women were there to be wanted, of course. To men, they often seemed to be there for no other reason. But how many of the men who actually got one stayed happy afterwards? Not many, unless Chaim missed his guess. He knew too well he wasn’t. What were you supposed to do? Turn into a queer?

"Lee had the uncomfortable feeling of being more in sympathy with his country's foes than with such friends as the men of America Will Break.

Lincoln said, "Men of Kentucky, men of America, if you vote to go South, you vote to forget Washington and Patrick Henry, Jefferson and Nathan Hale, Jackson and John Paul Jones. Remember the nation your fathers joined, remember the nation so many of you fought so bravely to defend. God bless the United States of America!"

Some cheered; more, Lee thought, booed. He found no small irony in the fact that three of Lincoln's "American" heroes, Washington, Patrick Henry, and Jefferson, had been slaveholding Virginians; Martha Washington's blood ran in the veins of his own wife. And the South revered the Founding Fathers no less than the North; he remembered coming into Richmond on Washington's birthday and finding the War Department closed. And for that matter, Washington on horseback appeared on the Great Seal of the Confederate States. This time, he had no sympathy for Lincoln's claims."

You know what I mean. Is it true the folk hereabouts” — he pointed to the land ahead — “are cripples? Missing half their hindquarters?”
“The fauns? Cripples?” I laughed. “By the gods who made them, no!

Assassins murdered freedom merely by existing.

The difference between bad and worse is a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.

They were having a good time, an adventure. That was January’s dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen’s suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives — a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do — so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one — young, and free, and happy.

When you thought of permanent oblivion, temporary oblivion was the only foxhole you had.

If a republic will stand or fall on the fate of any single man, it finds itself in grave danger indeed,

how could you go on thinking somebody was better than you by nature when he ran away for fear that you would blow him a new asshole with your Springfield? Wasn't he a man, just like you? Wasn't he a frightened man, just like you?

What does not corrupt a man’s heart cannot corrupt his life, or do him any lasting harm.

and the jerks back home sure aren’t helping.

"Isaac Cockrell finched but quickly gathered himself. "My friends," he said yet again, and this time was able to go on from here: "My friends, we're here tonight to show we all want Nathan Bedford Forrest to be the next President of our Confederate States of America."

Forrest's Trees raised a cheer. So did a good many men and women in the crowd; the women, of course, could not vote, but they enjoyed a rousing political spectacle no less than their husbands and brothers, fathers and sons."

Somewhere near the Alamo, a bugle brayed: either that or McCulloch’s men had found some reason to torture a poor, defenseless donkey.