Once he’d been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on was subtly less satisfactory than what he … - Algis Budrys

Nobody liked him. Nobody loved him—and this bothered him. But everyone kowtowed to him, and that, it seems, was what he held most precious.

Always lobbying for his own emotions, he was the perfect man for a job the administration had tacitly committed to ineptitude.

“Armies!” he burst out. “The day Freemen organize to invade another area is the day they stop being Freemen. They become soldiers, loyal to the army and their generals. They lose their identification with their homes and families. They become a separate class—an armed, organized class of military specialists no one family can stand against. And on that day, freedom dies for everybody.