“"You've never heard of Paul Revere?" "No." "Lucky man, Sharpe. He called my father a traitor, and our family called Revere a traitor, and I rather think we lost the argument."”

“A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a theif or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist.”

“By the 1970s, the American woman was being called ‘liberated’ or ‘superwoman’ while the American man was being called ‘baby killer’ if he fought in Vietnam, ‘traitor’ if he protested, or ‘apathetic’ if he did neither. Even men who came home paraplegics were literally spit on.”

“If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.”

“A son honors his father,
And a servant his master.
If then I am the Father,
Where is my honor?
And if I am a Master,
Where is My reverence?”

“If you capture a ship, Sharpe, you keep the old name unless it's really obnoxious. Nelson took the Franklin at the Nile, an eighty gun thing of great beauty, but the navy will be damned if it has a ship named after a traitorous bloody Yankee so we call her the Canopus now.”

“Any man can turn traitor.”

“No man expects such exact fidelity as a traitor.”
fidei acerrimus exactor est perfidus

“The traitor to humanity is the traitor most accursed;
Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod,
Than to be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!”

“The highest thing in a man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. You are my highest reverence.”