These matters should incite more urgent investigation than the technology you arrogated from your attackers. But like most primitive cultures, your r… - Charles E. Gannon

You gotta remember that in war, you’re not deciding between the bad thing to and the good thing. You’re choosing between the bad and the worse. And you can’t control the shit that happens after you choose.

So—I'm a major. New pay grade." She laughed. "My salary has just jumped from nothing to next-to-nothing. What will I spend it all on?

And over the many months that followed, as Caine crept through both terrestrial and alien undergrowth on missions to reclaim some of the autonomy humanity had lost, he learned and relearned the prime lesson in common to all the shocks:
That all assumptions, like all plans, or never more than a second away from a catastrophic collision with reality.