“The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.”

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.

We can’t command our love, but we can our actions.

I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

The game is afoot.

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.

There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

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.

A great cause of evil in the world is that men seldom think themselves criminal if they offer the same injustice to others that has been successfully practiced on themselves.

Though we may not desire to detect fraud, we must not, on that account, endeavor to be insensible of it, for, as cunning is a crime, so is duplicity a fault, and if men dread knaves, they also despise fools.

An English criminal, you know is always better concealed in London than anywhere else.

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it’s at the bottom. It’s the people who are in school systems that don’t educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.

Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.

When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

You cannot undermine police authority and then complain about rising crime.

Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are we supposed to do, write to them? Why don’t they just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the postmen can look for them while they deliver the mail?