Flashman the non-Founding Father

      It’s understandable, to be sure: they have to live with their ancestors’ folly and pretend that it was all for the best, and that the monstrous collection of platitudes which they call a Constitution, which is worse than useless because it can be twisted to mean anything you please by crooked lawyers and grafting politicos, is the ultimate human wisdom. Well, it ain’t, and it wasn’t worth one life, American or British, in the War of Independence, let alone the vile slaughter of the Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Celtic race in the Civil War. But perhaps you need to stand on Cemetery Ridge after Pickett’s charge to understand that.
      I put these thoughts to Lincoln, you know, after the war, and he sat back, cracking his knuckles and eyeing me slantendicular.
      “Flashman the non-Founding Father is a wondrous thought,” says he.

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.105, Harper Collins, 1995.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, constitution.

Flashman on American independence

      But try telling that to a smart New Yorker, or an Arkansas chawbacon, or a pot-bellied Virginian Senator; point out Canada and Australia managed their way to peaceful independence without any tomfool Declarations or Bunker Hills or Shilohs or Gettysburgs, and are every bit as much “the land of the free” as Kentucky or Oregon, and all you’ll get is a great harangue about “liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, damn your Limey impudence, from the first; a haw-haw and stream of tobacco juice across your boots from the second; and a deal of pious fustian about a new nation forged in blood emerging into the sunlight under Freedom’s flag, from the third. You might as well be listening to an intoxicated Frog.

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.105, Harper Collins, 1995.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, liberty.

Exchanging governments

      1876 being the hundredth anniversary of the glorious moment when the Yankee colonists exchanged a government of incompetent British scoundrels for one of ambitious American sharpers…

Flashman and the Redskins, p.251, Pan Books edition, 1983.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, revolution.