Let ’em try

A scandal was averted, and Sir Harry, taxed with his behaviour by indignant lawyers — principally his own, a sorely-tried and ready-witted practitioner in Wine Office Court — claimed total innocence of any attempt to pervert the course of justice. On being assured that he might easily have been prosecuted for conspiracy, the old soldier had remarked scornfully: ‘Let ’em try to put a ninety-two-year-old hero of Balaclava in the Scrubs if they dare. There’d be a revolution.’ And there that particular aspect of the case rested, with not a few sighs of relief.


Mr American, p.394, Pan Books, paperback edition 1982.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, justice.

Runs in the family

     Cassel shook his head. ‘It’s hard to believe, perhaps, that he knew a man who fought in the last revolution in these islands. His own Grandfather served against the Jacobites at Culloden. I say served — in fact, according to Flashman, his grandfather ran screaming from the field at the first shot, and didn’t stop running till he reached Inverness.’



Mr American, p.198, Pan Books, paperback edition 1982.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, Culloden.

You say you want a revolution

      “You imagine I act out of unscrupulous self-interest; true, all revolutionaries do. They agitate and harangue and justify every villainy in the name of high ideals; they lie, to delude the people, whom they hold in contempt. They seek nothing but their personal ends…”

Flashman and the Dragon, p.134, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.




Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, revolutionaries.

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.

Start the revolution without me

Mark you, our populace may be wiser than it knows, for so far as I can see revolutions never benefited the ordinary folk one bit; they have to work just as hard and starve just as thin as ever. All the good they may get from a rebellion is perhaps a bit of loot and rape at the time – and our English peasantry doesn’t seem to go in for that sort of thing at home, possibly because they’re mostly married men with responsibilities.

Royal Flash, p.245, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,revolution.

Spoilt child of fortune

His nose was beaky and his eyes blue and prominent and unwinking - they looked out on the world with the serinity that marks the nobleman whose uttermost ancestor was born a nobleman too. It is the look your parvenu would give half his fortune for, that unruffable gaze of the spoilt child of fortune who knows with unshakable certainty that he is right and that the world is exactly ordered for his satisfaction.

It is the look that makes underlings writhe and causes revolutions. I saw it then , and it remained changeless as long as I knew him, even through the roll-call beneath Causeway Heights when the grim silence as the names were shouted out testified to the loss of five hundred of his command. 'It is no fault of mine,' he said than, and he didn't just believe it; he knew it.



Flashman, p. 31, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, James Brudenell, Lord Cardigan.