Quotes from John Buchan

He had just the same narrow head, and stubborn mouth, and honest, quick-tempered eyes. It is the type that makes dashing regimental officers, and earns V.C.'s, and gets done in wholesale. I was never that kind. I belonged to the school of the cunning cowards.

The war had called forth the finest qualities of human nature, and with the advent of peace there seemed a risk of the world slipping back into a dull materialism. Men had begun to ask of everything its cash value, and to cherish, as if it were a virtue, a narrow utilitarian commonsense.

In a tangle of duties a man must seize the solitary clear one... Buchan, John. Salute to Adventurers (p. 172). Kindle Edition.

A man's courage is like a horse that refuses a fence; you have got to take him by the head and cram him at it again. If you don't, he will funk worse next time. I hadn't enough courage to be able to take chances with it, though I was afraid of many things, the thing I feared most was being afraid.

all the little rags of honest impulse and stumbling kindness with which we try to shelter ourselves from the winds of space.

You find hate more among journalists and politicians at home than among fighting men.

bloated industrials, who were piling up fortunes abroad while they were wrecking their country at home.

I made a fine tramp and a fair drover;

Well, she is my most beloved and adored kinswoman, and for her sake I would commit most crimes.

Five reasonably intelligent men sat in a stupor of impotence, repeating wearily the essentials of a problem which they could not solve.

The best way to be rid of quaking knees is to keep a busy mind.

In the same week he would harass an Under-Secretary about horses from the Army, write voluminously to the press about a gun he had invented for potting aeroplanes, give a fancy-dress ball which he forgot to attend, and get in the semi-final of the racquets championship.

I have to consider the honour of my house.' 'Honour?' Jaikie queried. 'Yes, honour,' said Ashie severely. 'Have you anything to say against it?' 'N-o-o. But it's an awkward word and apt to obscure reason.' 'It is a very real thing, which you English do not understand.' 'We understand it well enough, but we are shy of talking about it.

We were at Glenaicill—six of us—for the duck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. Since five in the morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and we settled ourselves in the smoking room for a sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.

Tommy sniffed the spring breeze like a supercilious stag.

What's dooty, if you won't carry it to the other side of Hell? What's the use of yapping about your country if you're going to keep something back when she calls for it? What's the good of meaning to win the war if you don't put every cent you've got on your stake?... No, Dick, that kind of dooty don't deserve a blessing. You dursn't keep anything back if you want to save your soul.

Why does wealth make dull people so much duller?

must have been very tired, for I was getting as full of silly prejudices as a minor poet.

Don't be afraid. This is going to be a very peaceful party.

Hideous, and yet comic too; for the spectacle of these feverish cranks toiling to create a new heaven and a new earth and thinking themselves the leaders of mankind, when they were dancing like puppets at the will of a few scoundrels engaged in the most ancient of pursuits, was an irony to make the gods laugh. I asked who was their leader. Macgillivray said he

though I was afraid of many things, the thing I feared most mortally was being afraid. I

and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun.

It's idiocy, but all war is idiotic, and the most whole-hearted idiot is apt to win.

My poalitics is just an auld wife's poalitics that wants to be left in peace by her fireside…