mystery quotes 1 2
Albert Einstein
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”
Sir Winston Churchill & Lady Astor
Lady Astor: “Winston, if you were my husband, I should
flavour your coffee with poison.”
Churchill: “Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.”
Norm Crosby
“When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands
of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty."
Steven Wright
"If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?"
Martin Luther King Jr.
“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me,
but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”
Abraham Lincoln
“He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents,
and then when the sentence was about to be pronounced,
pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.”
The Jazz Age/ Time Life: College Humor, 1927
“He was the editor of the tabloid ‘newspaper’ but he loved his children.
So he told them he was a burglar."
A friend of John Dillinger
“Johnnie’s just an ordinary fellow. Of course, he goes out and holds up banks and things, but he’s really just like any other fellow, aside from that.”
Woody Allen
“Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one consider that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.”
Al Capone
“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun
than you can with a kind word alone.”
O. Henry
“A burglar who respects his art always takes his time
before taking anything else.”
Shakespeare / Macbeth
“Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?”
Samuel Butler
“In law, nothing is certain but the expense.”
Edgar Watson Howe
“Many a man is saved from being a thief by finding everything locked up.”
Mary Roberts Rinehart (said it first)
“Trouble is my business.”
Joseph T. Chew
“Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that
his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting
a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces.”
George Bernard Shaw
“The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.”
Steven Wright
“I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards.
I got a full house and four people died.”
Chester Gould / Dick Tracy
“Crime does not pay.”
Oscar Wilde
“A community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.”
Dashiell Hammet / Sam Spade
“I won’t play the sap for you.”
Arthur Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes
"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."
Scott Adams
“I believe everybody in the world should have guns. Citizens should have bazookas and rocket launchers too. I believe that all citizens should have their weapons of choice. However, I also believe that only I should have the ammunition. Because frankly, I wouldn’t trust the rest of the goobers with anything more dangerous than string.”
Steve Wright
“Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced
everything in it with exact duplicates . . . when I pointed it out to
my roommate, he said, "Do I know you?"
Alfred Hitchcock
When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, “It’s in the script.” If he says, “But what’s my motivation?” I say, “Your salary.”
Albert Einstein
“One cannot but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to merely comprehend a little of this mystery everyday.”
Merle Travis / Sixteen Tons
"Step aside -- a lotta men didn't and a lotta men died."
Charlie Chan
"Murder without bloodstains is like Amos without Andy - most unusual."
Bill Becker
“I robbed from the rich, kind of like Robin Hood, except I kept it.”
Shakespeare / Lady MacBeth
“Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”
Will Rogers
“We don’t seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it
and then tax it out of business?”
Arthur Conan Doyle / Sherlock Holmes
“Dear me, Watson, is it possible that you have not penetrated
the fact that the case hangs upon the missing dumb-bell?"
G.K. Chesterton
"Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars,
I am informed, get up the night before."
O. Henry The Gentle Grafter
“It was beautiful and simple, as all truly great swindles are.”
Shakespeare Othello
“The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief.”
Oscar Wilde The Ballad of Reading Gaol
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves
…The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.”
Shakespeare Macbeth
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
Come let me clutch thee.”
Proverb
“Murder will out.”
W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado
“I’ve got a little list – I’ve got a little list.
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed – who never would be missed.”
Sir Walter Scott Marmion
“O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!”
Henry David Thoreau Miscellanies
“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong,
as when you find a trout in the milk.”
Shakespeare Macbeth
“Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
English Proverb
“Revenge is a dish that should be eaten cold.”
Francis Bacon
“In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy;
but in passing it over, he is superior.”
George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum
“Living well is the best revenge.”
Dion Boucicault London Assurance
“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.”
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham 1628-1687 The Rehearsal
“Ay, now the plot thickens very much upon us.”
William Cowper 1731-1800 of a burglar
“He found it inconvenient to be poor.”
From the film 9 to 5
"I'm no fool. I just killed the boss. You think they're not
going to fire me for a thing like that?"
Daphne Du Maurier
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend
“He’d be sharper than a serpent’s tooth,
if he wasn’t as dull as ditch water.”
Frank Abagnale
“If my forgeries looked as bad as the CBS documents,
it would have been 'Catch Me In Two Days'.”
John Dryden
“For secrets are edged tools, and must be
kept from children and from fools.”
Fedor Dostoevsky
“I wanted to murder, for my own satisfaction…At that moment I did not care a damn whether I would become the benefactor of someone, or would spend the rest of my life like a spider catching them all in my web and sucking the living juices out of them.”
Jennifer Capriati
“I know there is much mystery,
much question to what happened,
and I must also say, many lies.”
Charles Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit
“He’d make a lovely corpse.”
Benjamin Disraeli, 1867
“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”
T.S. Eliot Macavity: the Mystery Cat
“He always has an alibi,
and one or two to spare:
At whatever time the deed took place –
MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!”
Alfred Adler
“The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression.
It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.”
Frank Abagnale
“What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today.
Technology breeds crime.”
Robert Louis Stevenson More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter
“He who was prepared to help the escaping murderer or to embrace the impenitent thief, found, to the overthrow of all his logic,
that he objected to the use of dynamite.”
Ogden Nash Don’t Guess, Let Me Tell You
“And when the killer is finally trapped into a confession by some elaborate device of the Had I But Known-er some hundred pages later than if they hadn’t held their knowledge aloof, Why, they say, why Inspector I knew all along it was he but I couldn’t tell you, you would have
laughed at me unless I had absolute proof.”
V.S. Pritchett
“The detective novel is the art-for-art’s-sake of our yawning Phillistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.”
Graham Greene
“Detective stories – the modern fairy tales.”
Northrop Frye
“In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mobs.”
Ogden Nash The Spinster Detective
“Had she told the dicks
How she got in that fix,
I would be much apter
To read the last chapter.”
John Mortimer
“I’ve always enjoyed crime fiction. I think that much of the best writing being done today is in crime novels. The plot and discipline essential to a crime novel save it from the terrible traps of being sensitive and stream-of-consciousness and all of that stuff.”
Michael Dibdin
“A genre which has traditionally been bedevilled by rules, regulations,
and rituals reminiscent of a third-rate Masonic cult.”
Howard Scott
“Criminal - A person with predatory instincts who has not
sufficient capital to form a corporation.”
Jerry Seinfeld
“Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains,
a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with
a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem.
Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.”
Homer Simpson
"Stealing! How could you?! Haven't you learned anything from that guy
who gives those sermons at church? Captain What’s-his-name?"
Steven Wright
" All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a department store...with a pricing gun. She said, ''Give me all of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store.''"
Henny Youngman
“I played a lot of tough clubs in my time. Once a guy in one of those
clubs wanted to bet me $10 that I was dead. I was afraid to bet.”
Unknown
“A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is
someone who will help you move a body.”
mystery quotes 1 2
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