George MacDonald Fraser Quotes

For some reason which escapes me, there seems to be a feeling now that we have a moral duty to interfere in foreign disputes, and tell other countries how they should govern themselves, especially if so-called democracy is thought to be in danger.

They [women] cannot march as far or as fast as men, or endure the front-line ordeal as well, or drive a bayonet into an enemy with the same force, or tackle bare-handed an opponent far more muscular and brutal than they are. Some may be trained to shoot well, but whether they will do so in action with male callousness (and eagerness) is doubtful. Courage doesn't come into it. Women are if anything braver than men, but the notion of a female teenager fighting hand-to-hand with a Panzer Grenadier or a Japanese White Tiger - or a Royal Marine - is ludicrous.

We all have kindly impulses, fostered by two thousand years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have the killer instinct, too, the murderous impulse of the hunter...

There are few sounds as menacing as a bayonet being fixed.

You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it. You may not like what you see, but do not on that account fall into the error of trying to adjust it to suit your own vision of what it ought to have been.

I never said, and don't believe, that all Germans are Nazis. I'm just pretty sure that they're all Germans, and that is the point.

Certainly we tend to be resistant to change, on the whole, but that is because we have learned the hard way that change for its own sake is not a good idea, and that if something works more or less satisfactorily, it is best not to alter it without long and careful thought.

Another discovery was that the size and importance of an action is no yardstick of its personal unpleasantness. A big operation which commands headlines may be a dawdle for some of those involved, while the little forgotten patrol is a real horror.

He [<nowiki/>Anthony Crosland] and his Socialist fellow-theoreticians did a terrific job in degrading scholastic standards in the name of equality, which meant dragging down the good to the level of the mediocre.

Gravity, muzzle velocity, density, intensity, one for his nob, and bullshit baffles brains! There - into the breach, old Whatsit, and if all else fails we'll fix a bayonet on the bloody thing and charge! Fire at Will, he's hiding in the cellar, the cowardly sod!

The stark truth, of course, is that they have not abolished the death penalty at all. They have merely transferred it from the guilty to the innocent - and incidentally ensured that many more violent deaths occur.