Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.

Self-preservation's a man's first duty. And natives don't mind dying, you know. They don't feel about it as Europeans do.

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. [Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories.]

Until one looks back on one's own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.

There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.