District Commissioner Quotes in The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

District Commissioner: It would have been wiser if you'd both gone home at the end of your army service.

Peachy Carnehan: Home to what? A porters uniform outside a restaurant, attainin' tips from belching civilians for closing cab doors on them and their blowsy women?

Daniel Dravot: Not for us, thank you. Not after watching Afghans come howling down out of the hills and taking battlefield command when all the officers had copped it.

Peachy Carnehan: Well said, Brother Dravot.

District Commissioner: I have your records before me. There's everything in them, from smuggling to swindling to receiving stolen goods to bare-faced blackmail.

Peachy Carnehan: Sir, I resent the accusation of blackmail. It is blackmail to obtain money by threats of publishing information *in* a newspaper. But what blackmail is there in accepting a small retainer for keeping it *out* of a newspaper?

District Commissioner: And how did you propose to keep it out?

Peachy Carnehan: By telling the editor what I know about his sister, and a certain government official in these parts.

Daniel Dravot: [Referring to Kipling, the journalist present] Let him put *that* in his paper, if he has need of news.

District Commissioner: The may be no criminal charges against you, but I'll see these files reach Calcutta with a recommendation that you be deported as political undesirables, detriments to the dignity of the Empire and the Izzat of the Raj.

Peachy Carnehan: Detriments you call us? Detriments? Well I want to remind you it was "detriments" like us that built this bloody Empire *and* the Izzat of the bloody Raj, 'ats on!