I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.

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.

A good friend of my son's is a son to me.

A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.

But have you ever overheard two women discussing men? Men are crude liars, comparing their drabs, but women - I'd rather have [an] anatomist dissect me alive than to listen to the things the ladies say about us when they think they are alone.

Cecil flashed a grin. "Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah..." Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word. "Equals?" Miles hazarded. "Cattle," Cecil corrected judiciously.