367 Quotes by Bernard Cornwell

How does a lawyer lie?” “With passion, Mr. Starbuck, and with a self-inflicted belief, albeit temporary, that the facts he is reciting are the very stuff of God’s own truth.

I have learned that it is one thing to kill in battle, to send a brave man’s soul to the corpse hall of the gods, but quite another to take a helpless man’s life...

Every day is ordinary, until it isn’t.

May the gods always send me stupid enemies.

The standing to be cannonaded,’ he wrote in the memoirs of his military service: and having nothing else to do, is about the most unpleasant thing that can happen to soldiers in an engagement.

Skin the colour of chestnuts.

Enemies come soon enough in a mans life,′ he told me, ’you don’t need to seek them out.

How can a god disapprove of a good hump?

An army isn’t made of its officers, you know, though we officers like to think it is. An army is no better than its men, and when you find good men, you must look after them. That’s an officer’s job.