Quotes about Pashtuns

“Pukhtoon with love will accompany you to the hell but with force not even to the heaven”--Bacha Khan

"The only thing we'll every agree on is that we will never agree on anything."--Bacha Khan

"The Pashtun tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian Every large house is a real feudal fortress....Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud.... Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid." --Winston Churchill

"Pashtun is not merely a race but, in fact, a state of mind; there is a Pashtun lying inside every man, who at times wakes up and overpowers him."--Ghani Khan

"The Pashtuns are a rain-sown wheat: they all came up on the same day; they are all the same. But the chief reason why I love a Pashtuns is that he will wash his face and oil his beard and perfume his locks and put on his best pair of clothes when he goes out to fight and die."--Ghani Khan

H.W. Bellew says "The pride of the Pashtun is a marked feature of their national character. They eternally boast of their descent, their prowess in arms and their independence and cap it all by "am I not a Pashtun."

Colonel 'Buster' Goodwin stationed for twenty years on the Frontier expresses his feelings about Pashtuns this way:
"Our dealing with Pashtuns was a gentleman's game. No matter how poor a Pashtun was, he might meet the King of England or the Viceroy of India but he'd look him in the eye and shake hands with him as if to say, I'm as good a man as you are."


A Pakhtun leader once told Elphinstone "We are content with discord; we are content with alarms; we are content with blood; but we never will be content with a master".


Elphinstone wrote, "The Pathans are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependents, hospitable, brave, hardy, frugal, laborious and prudent".