Skip to content

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.

— Harry Turtledove Southern Victory (1997)

Another quote →

Topics

Guns

More quotes by Harry Turtledove

I’ll tell you, though, this whole business of war would be a hell of a lot more fun if you didn’t get shot.

Southern Victory (1997)

The Confederate States had been founded on the principle that change was a bad idea.

Southern Victory (1997)

The only people who love a war are those who have never fought in one.

Southern Victory (1997)

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

A man who couldn’t see truth when it tried to shoot him wouldn’t live long, and didn’t deserve to.

Southern Victory (1997)

All Harry Turtledove quotes →

You may also like

From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen.

Frederick Douglass The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy.

Edward Abbey Abbey's Road (1979)

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Mao Zedong

Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.

Hermann Göring Radio broadcast (1936)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Harry Turtledove (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.