you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.

Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be.

Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow.

But to Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, for such a society is a house built upon sand.

I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.

To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.