  We say that a nonnegatively curved manifold $(M,g)$ has quarter pinched flag
curvature if for any two planes which intersect in a line the ratio of their
sectional curvature is bounded above by 4. We show that these manifolds have
nonnegative complex sectional curvature. By combining with a theorem of Brendle
and Schoen it follows that any positively curved manifold with strictly quarter
pinched flag curvature must be a space form. This in turn generalizes a result
of Andrews and Nguyen in dimension 4. For odd dimensional manifolds we obtain
results for the case that the flag curvature is pinched with some constant
below one quarter, one of which generalizes a recent work of Petersen and Tao.
