George MacDonald Fraser Quotes

I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong lette...

You must convince your chiefs that what you're telling 'em is important, which ain't difficult, since they want to believe you, having chiefs of their own to satisfy; make as much mystery of your meth...

I was sufficiently recovered from my nervous condition – or else the booze was beginning to work – to be able to discuss with Rudi the merits of checked or striped trousers, which had been the great d...

. . what is thought now, and held to be universal truth, was not thought then, or true of that time.

It was part of war; men died, more would die, that was past, and what mattered now was the business in hand; those who lived would get on with it. Whatever sorrow was felt, there was no point in talki...

We stood there for a full half hour, like so many scarecrows, while they jeered at us from a distance, and one or two of us were shot down.

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.

But I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgment --in short, for the true talent for catastrophe --...

Walking the plank is a Victorian fiction, and I will not have it on my ship!

I've been a Danish prince, a Texas slave-dealer, an Arab sheik, a Cheyenne Dog Soldier, and a Yankee navy lieutenant in my time, among other things, and none of 'em was as hard to sustain as my lifeti...

Elgin himself looked ten years younger, now that he’d cast the die, but I thought exuberance had got the better of him when he strode into the saloon later, threw The Origin of Species on the table an...

In her, ignorance and stupidity formed a perfect shield against the world: this, I suppose, is innocence. It

You see, and the folly of sitting smug in judgment years after, stuffed with piety and ignorance and book-learned bias. Humanity is beastly and stupid, aye, and helpless, and there’s an end to it.

England was a menace to Scotland because Scotland was, by its separate existence, a constant anxiety to England.

I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the conseq...

The golden age, of Scotland, of Anglo-Scottish harmony, and of the Border country, ended when King Alexander III of Scotland fell over a cliff in 1286. Few stumbles—if indeed His Majesty was not pushe...

The 1563 agreement between England and Scotland speaks of lawfull Trodd with Horn and Hound, with Hue and Cry and all other accustomed manner of fresh pursuit; according to Scott, this obliged the pur...

If anything she was a shade too plump, but she knew the ninety-seven ways of making love that the Hindus are supposed to set much store bythough mind you, it is all nonsense, for the seventy-fourth po...

Wordy descriptions of the journey, which you can get from Parkman or Gregg if you want them – or from volume

Now Malcolm was back again, but he came once too often, and was killed at Alnwick in 1093.