“The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.”

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion.

Anything is better than stagnation.

Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.

There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.

One must wait till it comes.

It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.

Healthy scepticism is the basis of all accurate observation.

The future was with Fate. The present was our own.

Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

The individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done.

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Remorse is the fruit of crime.

War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.

It should never be a crime to be gay.

The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.

When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

Never wish to see a just cause defended with unjust means.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

As far as the laws of existence are concerned, there is no good and bad, no crime and punishment. It is just that for every action, there is a consequence.