A cool half million

           If you’ve read my previous memoirs you’ll know me better than Speedicut did, and won’t share his misgivings about trusting me with a cool half million in silver. Old Flash may be a model of the best vices — lechery, treachery, poltroonery, deceit and dereliction of duty, all present and correct, as you know, and they’re not the half of it — but larceny ain’t his style at all.


Flashman on the March, p.15, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, larceny.

Complete and unashamed

      There’s a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.



Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.310, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, treachery.

Blind luck

      You’ll have difficulty finding Ferozeshah (or Pheeroo Shah, as we Punjabi purists call it) in the atlas nowadays. It’s a scrubby little hamlet about halfway between Ferozepore and Moodkee, but in its way it’s a greater place than Delhi or Calcutta or Bombay, for it’s where the fate of India was settled — appropriately by treachery, folly, and idiot courage beyond belief. And most of all, by blind luck.



Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.245, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, luck.

Treason doth never prosper

Perhaps she should recall the saying of an English poet, that treason cannot prosper because with prosperity it ceases to be treason.




Flashman and the Dragon, p.93, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, treason.

A dishonest life

I have observed, in the course of a dishonest life, that when a rogue is outlining a treacherous plan, he works harder to convince himself than to move his hearers.

Flashman, p.148, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,dishonest, rogue,treacherous.

A first rate fellow

This I will say for the Afghan – he is a treacherous, evil brute when he wants to be, but while he is your friend he is a first rate fellow. The point is, you must judge to the second when he is going to cease to be friendly… Looking back, though, I can say I probably got on better with the Afghans than most Britons do. I imagine Tom Hughes would have said that in many respects of character I resembled them, and I wouldn’t deny it.

Flashman, p.99, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes.