Quotes
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.”
Albert Einstein
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
Will Rogers
“We don’t seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?”
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
“I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.”
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?”
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.””
Steven Wright
“If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?”
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.”
Sleuthing
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle / Sherlock Holmes
“It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Frank Herbert
“If a man lies about an apparently inconsequential thing, then that thing is not inconsequential.”
Rex Stout / Nero Wolfe
“There are two ways to catch a criminal: one, connect him with the crime itself; or two, prove that he knowingly took a share of the spoils.”
Rex Stout / Nero Wolfe
“A search for negative evidence is a desperate last resort when no positive evidence can be found. Collecting and checking alibis is dreary and usually futile drudgery. No. You get positive evidence and if you find it confronted by an alibi, and if your evidence is any good, break the alibi.”
Harry Kemelman
“(The percentage of error is particularly high in the legal profession where) … the intention is not to discover what the speaker wishes to convey, but rather what he wishes to conceal.”
Plotting
Anton Chekhov
“If somebody places a gun on the mantle in the first act, it must be fired before the end of the second.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.”
Alfred Hitchcock
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
E.W. Howe
“A thief believes everybody steals.”
Mary Roberts Rinehart
“The butler did it.”
S.S. Van Dine pseudo. For Willard Huntington Wright
“The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent – provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it.”
Agatha Christie / Jane Marple
“What you have to account for is if one person did see something why didn’t that person say so? … Possibility one. The person who saw it didn’t realize what they had seen. That would mean, of course, that it would have to be rather a stupid person. some, let us say, who can use their eyes but not their brain. … It might have been a person whose action in putting something in a glass was natural. It would be quite possible, audacious but possible, for someone to pick up that glass which as soon as it was in his hand or her hand, of course, would be assumed to be his or her own drink and to add whatever was added quite openly. In that case you see, people wouldn’t think twice…it would be a gamble, a risk, but it could happen…Possibility three…Somebody saw what happened and held their tongue deliberately … if so, it’s a very dangerous thing to do.
Law & Justice
H.L. Mencken
“Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”
Freda Adler
“Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.”
Samuel Butler
“The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God’s message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.”
Peire Cardenal
“If some beggar steals a bridle he’ll be hung by a man who’s stolen a horse.”
John Dryden
“Successful crimes alone are justified.”
Earl Wilson
“Somebody figured it out — we have 35 million laws trying to enforce Ten commandments.”
Robert Frost
“A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer”
Abraham Lincoln
“A jury too often has at least one member more ready to hang the panel than to hang the traitor.”
H.L. Mencken
“The common argument that crime is caused by povertyis a kind of slander on the poor.”
Robert Emmet Sherwood
“And who are the greater criminals – those who sell the instruments of death, or those who buy them and use them?”
Allen Tucker
“We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them.”
Mark Twain
“A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.”
Voltaire
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
Oscar Wilde
“As one reads history … one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.”
H.L. Mencken
“Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”
Movie Quotes
LADY IN THE LAKE
Screen Play by Steve Fisher Based on the Novel by Raymond Chandler Directed by and starring Robert Montgomery
Most of the dialogue is between the characters of Philip Marlowe and Adrianne Fromsett . In some cases initials have been used to indicate who is speaking. * denotes a new quote
*Philip Marlowe: “I was tired of being pushed around for nickels and dimes so I decided I’d write about murder. It’s safer.”
*Philip Marlowe: “Ok. You’re smart. But let me give you a tip. You’ve gotta watch them. You’ve gotta watch them all the time. Because things happen when you least expect them.”
* Adrianne Fromsett: “Besides, you see, people who write usually don’t know the facts and people who know the facts, usually can’t write. Authenticity has very little to do with it. If people who read our magazine knew the facts of life, Mr. Marlowe, they wouldn’t be reading our magazine.”
* Philip Marlowe: “Why don’t you quit being cute, Miss Fromsett. The real reason you had me up here is because you’re looking for a smooth operator who keeps his mouth shut and when you read the story you said, ‘Yup that’s my boy,’ he’s dumb, he’s brave and he’s cheap. Am I right?”
* PM: “… but this isn’t the ordinary blood and thunder yarn …”
* AF: “Please don’t be so difficult to get along with. I need help.”
PM: “Like I need four thumbs.”
AF: “I, um, I wonder how it would be to discuss this over a couple of ice cubes. Would you care to try?
PM: “Heh heh heh heh heh. Imagine you needing ice cubes.”
*AF: “You don’t marry the Chris Laverys of this world. You just pay their bills, lend them all the money they need and forget to ask for it back.”
* AF: “Tell me Mr. Marlowe, do you always fall in love with all your clients?”
PM: “Only the ones in skirts.”
* AF: “Well if you think I’m going to settle for a cheap detective you’re sadly mistaken. I’ve been pushed around too much in this world. There’s more than one Kingsby on the Christmas tree, Mr. Marlowe, and I’ll shake one loose yet, don’t you worry. And as for you, you’re off the case. There isn’t any case any more. Now kindly haul yourself out of here and send me a bill for your failure. I never want to see you again.”
* Derris Kingsby: “Well you want to facts don’t you?”
PM: “When it concerns a woman does anybody ever really want the facts?”
* AF: “Stop getting involved in other people’s murders. Why be a private detective at all?”
PM Why eat? You only get hungry again.
* De Gamo: “How does it feel dying in the dirty middle of somebody else’s love affair?
THE ZERO EFFECT
Written & Directed by Jake Kasdan
*Gregory Stark: “Imagine some opportunistic piece of bird shit has got a way to compromise you. What do you do about it? Cause you can’t buy silence. You can only rent it. So if someone has something on you, they are always going to have it. So the cost has no ceiling. And the fear has no end to it. That’s why, some knowledge, some information is like a terminal disease. It’s contagious and it’s fatal.”
* Daryl Zero: “I begin my examination with the method. I always say that the essence of my work relies fundamentally on two basic principles. Objectivity and observation or the two obs as I call them. My work relies on my ability to remain absolutely, purely objective. Detached. I have mastered the fine art of detachment. And while it comes at some cost, this supreme objectivity is what makes me, I dare say, the greatest observer the world has ever known.”
* Daryl Zero: “Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad, because of all the things in the world, you are only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good because of all the things in the world, you are sure to find some of them. And the most important rule: Often the thing you are looking for is right in front of your nose.”
* Daryl Zero: “I can’t possibly overstate the importance of good research. Everyone goes through life dropping crumbs. If you can recognize the crumbs you can trace back, all the way back from you death certificate to the dinner and the movie that resulted in you in the first place. But research is an art, not a science. Because anyone who knows what they are doing can find the crumbs, the wheres, the whats and the whos. The art is in the whys. The ability to read between the crumbs. Not to mix metaphors. For every event there is a cause and effect, for every crime a motive, and for every motive a passion. The art of the research is the ability to look at the details and see the passion.”
* Daryl Zero: “Passion is the enemy of precision. Forget the misnomer crime of passion. All crime is passionate. It is passion that moves the criminal to act, that disrupts the static inertia of morality. The client’s passion for this dead woman had facilitated his downfall. And the blackmailers passion would facilitate hers. When you live with no passion at all other people’s passions come into glaring relief.”