243 quotes
Potter knew perfectly well that it was true. He also knew that what was true and what made good propaganda often had not even a nodding acquaintance with each other.
Southern Victory (1997)
Manicheism, n., The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.
Southern Victory (1997)
Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started—you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy.
Southern Victory (1997)
Reverend Selfe glowered. He was good at glowering. His physiognomy gave him a head start, but he had talent, too.
Southern Victory (1997)
When war reached out its hand, what did wealth and power matter? A fool with a gun could take them away. A fool with a gun had just taken them away.
Southern Victory (1997)
“I see that this photograph shows me you have been imperfectly truthful here,” he told them, having been too well brought up to call a woman a liar to her face.
Southern Victory (1997)
Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer.
Southern Victory (1997)
Anne took her own attractiveness so much for granted, a man who showed he wasn’t completely in her grasp often succeeded in piquing her interest by sheer contrariness.
Southern Victory (1997)
Blaine hated the Confederate States because they were a rival, not because they were tyrants. Had they been exemplars of purest democracy, rivals they would have remained, and he would have hated them no less.
Southern Victory (1997)
Of course, the Confederacy was also a Christian country…and what did that say about Christianity? Nothing good, she was sure.
Southern Victory (1997)
He was still very young, young enough to believe in the tooth fairy, the common sense of Congress, and a great many other unlikelihoods.
Southern Victory (1997)
He knew what he imagined and what was real were not one and the same. Knowing it and coming to terms with it were not one and the same, either.
Southern Victory (1997)
He’d learned to strip and clean and reassemble the machine gun till he could do it with his eyes closed. It was an elegantly simple means of killing large numbers of men in a hurry, assuming that was what you wanted to do.
Southern Victory (1997)
Yes, they’d learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn’t matter. That you learned them did.
Southern Victory (1997)
No, he hadn’t a clue. She studied him—perfect coif, perfect clothes, perfect confidence. Inside, where it didn’t show, she smiled a hunter’s smile. Perfect target.
Southern Victory (1997)
Moss sighed and nodded. Might-have-beens was a stupid game, when you got right down to it. Look back on things, and you couldn’t help but see they’d come out the way they had to come out.
Southern Victory (1997)
Like South Carolina, Utah is too large to be an insane asylum and too small to make a nation, and, unlike South Carolina, lacks other nearby states full of zanies to join her in her madness.
Southern Victory (1997)
The Negro wasn’t wrong. And he understood the difference between deaths and effective deaths. A lot of Great War generals hadn’t—their method for smothering fires was burying them in bodies.
Southern Victory (1997)
“Glad you’re back safe. I heard you were wounded—happy it wasn’t too serious.”
“Yeah.” The only wound that wasn’t serious was the one that happened to the other guy.
Southern Victory (1997)
The newspapers extolled every skirmish as one Bonaparte would have admired (clumsy propaganda, in a province that had never reconciled itself to the French revolution), but anyone who believed all the newspapers said deserved nothing better than he got.
Southern Victory (1997)