George MacDonald Fraser

I must emphasise that at private soldier level you frequently have no idea where you are, or precisely how you got there, let alone why.

— George MacDonald Fraser

...a reluctance to recognise that today's safety and comfort were bought fifty years ago by means which today's intelligentsia find unacceptable, and from which they wish to distance themselves.

— George MacDonald Fraser

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.

— George MacDonald Fraser

...only those who have been really dry know that there is no drink like chaggle water, brackish, chlorinated, with a fine earthy silt at the bottom, pure Gunga Din juice. We hated it and would have sold our souls for it.

— George MacDonald Fraser

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.

— George MacDonald Fraser

Certainly no general [Slim] ever did more with less; in every way, he was one of the great captains.

— George MacDonald Fraser

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

— George MacDonald Fraser

[Regarding the 'Advance to Contact'] The simple truth about war is that if you are on the attack, you can't do a damned thing until you find your enemy, and the only way to do that is to push on, at whatever speed seems prudent, until you see or hear him, or he makes his presence known by letting fly at you.

— George MacDonald Fraser

Putting a grenade into a bunker had the satisfaction of doing grievous bodily harm to an enemy for whom I felt real hatred, and still do.

— George MacDonald Fraser

Not that lance-jack lance-corporal] is any great eminence; it is an appointment, not a rank, and is the worst dogs-body's job in the Army, as Hitler and I could tell you.

— George MacDonald Fraser

No one underestimated Jap: he might be a subhuman creature who tortured and starved prisoners of war to death, raped women captives, and used civilians for bayonet practice, but there was no braver soldier in the whole history of war, and if he fought to a finish...

— George MacDonald Fraser

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...

— George MacDonald Fraser

No doubt newspaper reports and broadcasts had encouraged us, civilian and military, to regard him [the Japanese] as an evil, misshapen, buck-toothed barbarian who looked and behaved like something sub-Stone Age; the experiences of Allied prisoners of war demonstrated that the reports had not lied and reinforced the view that the only good Jap was a dead one.

— George MacDonald Fraser

A Gurkha subaltern whom I met later told me that commanding a platoon of them was like leading a group of perfectly-disciplined ten-year-olds, and I believed him.

— George MacDonald Fraser

Only very young soldiers and head-cases object to boredom in war-time.

— George MacDonald Fraser

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.

— George MacDonald Fraser

But not half as angry, I dare swear, as our forefathers would be if they could see the betrayal, by worthless politicians, of the country they worked so hard to build, and the surrender of the precious freedoms won by better men at Gravelines and Trafalgar and Waterloo and Flanders and Alamein and in the skies above Kent.

— George MacDonald Fraser

What matters above all is sovereignty, the right to make our own laws......the right to remain independent of the unworthy, undemocratic, unprincipled, authoritarian, bureaucratic rabble of Brussels.

— George MacDonald Fraser

First, I hope to see the British public resist the propaganda onslaught of the pro-Europeans, in which the broadcast media, led by the BBC, have shown themselves willing tools of the government, and vote a resounding "no" in the referendum, if and when it comes.

— George MacDonald Fraser

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.

— George MacDonald Fraser

Does he A N Wilson] really believe that there is no nostalgia for the triumphant days of the Third Reich among that proud and valorous race, or that they have forgiven and forgotten that in two great wars the English-speaking people beat the hell out of them, humiliated them, conquered them?

— George MacDonald Fraser

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.

— George MacDonald Fraser

That political correctness should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country's decline.

— George MacDonald Fraser

...the leaders of an independent Scotland will be only too happy to trade away that independence in return for admission to the fleshpots of Brussels for themselves and their families, goes without saying; they have the example of Westminster to copy.

— George MacDonald Fraser

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.

— George MacDonald Fraser

Whoever said that Russia was an enigma inside a something-or-other inside something else, was dead right. I don't understand the place yet.

— George MacDonald Fraser

...and I haven't got to the bloody Japanese yet, with their poisoned stakes and booby traps and nasty habit of using prisoners for bayonet practice and no-surrender valour and fighting ability to match our own...almost.

— George MacDonald Fraser

It is a habit of great countries of imperial pretensions to take the future for granted, as the Romans did in Trajan's day, and as Britons, with a few far-sighted exceptions, did at Victoria's jubilees, and Americans do now.

— George MacDonald Fraser

He [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.

— George MacDonald Fraser

[re Princess Diana's death] I wondered at the time, what had happened to the moral fibre of the island race - the stiff upper lip, if you like - to make them behave like professional mourners howling for hire. The Prime Minister was proud. I was ashamed.

— George MacDonald Fraser

But with today's mammoth papers the poor boobs have to write at ten times the length their subject is worth, and apart from over-padded news we have the curse of modern journalism, the proliferation of the commentary, the background exposition, the in-depth analysis, the "think-piece", all adding up to an indigestible stream of crap which no one wants to read, and no one, to judge by the mechanical repetition and weary rambling, wants to write either.

— George MacDonald Fraser