Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant. - Lois McMaster Bujold

There is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That’s soul-destroying. The other way around is merely very, very irritating.

Anyway, she now realized, the military histories she’d read had left out the most important part; they never told what happened to people’s babies.

Ethan had never found himself clinging to a cusp of human history. The trouble with the position, he found, was that in whatever direction you looked there fell away a glassy, uncontrollable slide down to a strange future you would then have to live in. He had never wanted to pray more, nor been less sure that it would do any good.