If you place your head in a lion's mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off.

you cannot give to people what they are incapable of receiving.

Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it all as in the day's work....where crime is concerned, she's the goods.

I've a theory that one can always get anything one wants if one will pay the price. And do you know what the price is, nine times out of ten? Compromise.

It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again." Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.

It is really a hard life. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.

Everyone is a potential murderer-in everyone there arises from time to time thewish to kill-though not the will to kill.