Hemingway’s protagonist goes recruiting and chooses quality over quantity. Trust is what sorts the good men from the ‘undependables’. 

‘I could use twenty more men, to be sure,’ Robert Jordan said.

‘Good ones do not exist.  You want undependables?’

‘No.  How many good ones?’

‘Maybe four.’

‘Why so few?’

‘No trust.’ 

Source: Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (London: Grafton Books, 1987), p. 133

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