~
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed
or numbered.  My life is my own.

        -- Number Six in "Arrival"
~
"Etre gouvern, c'est tre gard  vue, inspect, espionn,
dirig, lgifr, rglement, parqu, endoctrin, prch, contrl,
estim, apprci, censur, command, par des tres qui n'ont ni le
titre, ni la science, ni la vertu.

Etre gouvern, c'est tre,  chaque opration,  chaque
transaction,  chaque mouvement, not, enregistr, recens,
tarif, timbr, tois, cotis, patent, licenci, autoris,
apostill, admonest, empch, rform, redress, corrig. C'est,
sous prtexte d'utilit publique, et au nom de l'intrt gnral,
tre mis  contribution, exerc, ranonn, exploit, monopolis,
concussionn, pressur, mystifi, vol ; puis,  la moindre
rsistance, au premier mot de plainte, rprim, amend, vilipend,
vex, traqu, houspill, assomm, dsarm, garrott, emprisonn,
fusill, mitraill, jug, condamn, dport, sacrifi, vendu,
trahi, et pour comble, jou, bern, outrag, dshonor. Voil le
gouvernement, voil sa justice, voil sa morale !"

  -- P.-J. Proudhon, Ide gnrale de la Rvolution au XIXe sicle, 1851.
~
"Everyday, when I wake up, I try to imagine the kind of world I'd
like to live in. I can actually picture it in my head. It
wouldn't be a paradise : there'd still be traffic jams, bad
coffee, and award shows. But I'll tell you what there wouldn't
be : nobody like you -- rich, arrogant, lying, suckfish. Not a
single one of you left on the face of the earth. I don't just
sit around dreaming about this, I work at it. I work very hard to
make it real."

        (Mr Chapel to Don Block, in Vengeance Unlimited -- Justice)
~
KC: "Quick question."
Chapel: "Yeah ?"
KC: "Are you Satan ?"
Chapel: "No."
KC: "Just checking."

        (Vengeance Unlimited)
~
Chapel: "OK, new rule: Stop saying 'ohmygod'."

        (Vengeance Unlimited)
~
Chapel (as Arnie): "I'm not as smart as I look."

        (Vengeance Unlimited)
~
KC : "What's wrong with you ?!?"
Chapel : "Plenty. We live in a world, you and I, where people can kill
someone and get a book deal out of it because they hire the right
lawyer, or they get an acting teacher who teaches them how to
cry on camera."
KC : "You think you can change all that ?"
Chapel : "Well, maybe not, but I don't have to tolerate it."
~
KC : "You hate me, don't you ?"
Chapel : "No, but my love can take strange forms."
~
Budnick : "So what are you, some kind of cop ?"
Chapel : "I'm just a guy who gets up every morning. I look around and
I see people like you, and it makes me kind of sick. You all look
the same, you're all greedy, full of yourselves, and I wonder
if there's a big dome someplace where they grow you."
~
Love your country, but never trust its government.
	-- Robert A. Heinlein.
~
"The power to tax involves the power to destroy;...the power to
destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create...."
	-- Chief Justice John Marshall, 1819.
~
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will,
within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."
	-- Thomas Jefferson
~
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government
of himself.  Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
	-- Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address
~
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring
one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their
own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the
mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good
government, and all that is necessary to close the circle of our
felicities.
	-- Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address
~
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
	-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
~
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty
when the government's purposes are beneficient...The greatest dangers
to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal,
well meaning but without understanding."
	-- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
~
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the
pursuit of justice is no virtue."
	-- Barry Goldwater (actually written by Karl Hess)
~
"I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing,
and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
	-- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787
~
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people
who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of
the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional
right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it
or overthrow it."
        -- Abraham Lincoln, 4 April 1861
~
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound
to enforce it.  	-- 16 Am. Jur. Sec. 177 late 2d, Sec 256
~
"The state calls its own violence `law',
but that of the individual `crime'"
	-- Max Stirner
~
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens
who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard
the preservation of freedom as the basic
purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously
work and sacrifice for that freedom."
        -- John F. Kennedy (liar !)
~
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force;
like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master.
Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
	-- George Washington, in a speech of January 7, 1790
~
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain
occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to
be exercised  at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.
        -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, 1787
~
[W]hat country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers
are not warned from time to time that [the] people preserve the spirit
of resistance?  Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
	-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787
~
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty.  Suspect every one
who approaches that jewel.  Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it
but downright force.  Whenever you give up that force, you are
inevitably ruined."
        -- Patrick Henry, speech of June 5 1788
~
A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing
which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety,
is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made
and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
	-- John Stuart Mill, writing on the U.S. Civil War in 1862
~
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a
reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle
for independence.
       -- Attributed to Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)
~
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible
will make violent revolution inevitable."
	-- John F. Kennedy
~
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can
bribe the people with their own money.
	-- Alexis de Tocqueville
~
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of
authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was
made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There
are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to
govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
	-- Daniel Webster
~
What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization of
the individual right to lawful defense."
	-- Frederic Bastiat, "The Law"
~
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it.
Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police,
prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers,
and treats the victim -- when he defends himself -- as a criminal.
        -- Frederic Bastiat, "The Law"
~
Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.
	-- General George Stark.
~
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year,
that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution,
if any such is possible.
	-- Henry David Thoreau
~
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any
member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm
to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient
warrant.
        -- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty", 1859
~
You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it
will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it
would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered
	-- Lyndon Johnson, former President of the U.S.
~
The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse
every time Congress meets
	-- Will Rogers
~
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
	-- R. Buckminster Fuller
~
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may
be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons
than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may
sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those
who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they
do so with the approval of their consciences.
	-- C. S. Lewis
~
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our
liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of
citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late
Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had
strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in
precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they
avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this
lesson too much ... to forget it
        -- James Madison.
~
A ``decay in the social contract'' is detectable; there is a growing
feeling, particularly among middle-income taxpayers, that they are not
getting back, from society and government, their money's worth for
taxes paid. The tendency is for taxpayers to try to take more control
of their finances...
        -- IRS Strategic Plan, (May 1984)
~
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by
men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot
be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be
repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such
incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can
guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of
action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less
fixed?
        -- James Madison, Federalist Papers 62
~
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the
Constitution which grant[s] a right to Congress of expending, on
objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
	-- James Madison, 1794
~
..every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any
Right to but himself.  The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his
Hands, we may say, are properly his. .... The great and chief end
therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves
under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.
	-- John Locke, "A Treatise Concerning Civil Government"
~
The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything
which would be unlawful for them to do themselves.
	-- John Locke, "A Treatise Concerning Civil Government"
~
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably
by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for
the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot
be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime
in this country is closely connected with this.
	-- Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921
~
Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.
	-- Mohandas Gandhi
~
The real point of audits is to instill fear, not to extract revenue;
the IRS aims at winning through intimidation and (thereby) getting
maximum voluntary compliance
        -- Paul Strassel, former IRS Headquarters Agent
           (Wall St. Journal 1980)
~
Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person.
He might start thinking he knows what's right for you.
	-- Paul Williams, `Das Energi'
~
The IRS has become morally corrupted by the enormous power which we in
Congress have unwisely entrusted to it. Too often it acts like a
Gestapo preying upon defenseless citizens.
	-- Senator Edward V. Long
~
The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion
        -- George Washington & John Adams,
           in a diplomatic message to Malta.
~
This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were
no religion in it.
        -- John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.
~
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to
liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses
in return for protection to his own.
        -- Thomas Jefferson, 1814
~
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme
Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the
fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
	-- Thomas Jefferson, 1823
~
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
	-- Thomas Jefferson
~
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there
be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of
blindfolded fear.... Do not be frightened from this inquiry from any
fear of its consequences. If it ends in the belief that there is no
God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and
pleasantness you feel in its exercise...
	-- Thomas Jefferson, in a 1787 letter to his nephew
~
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements
of Christian dogma.
	-- Abraham Lincoln
~
"...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First
Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the
government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The
Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms
until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you
have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI
agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no
right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances."
        -- Harry Browne,
           1996 USA presidential candidate, Libertarian Party
~
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of
limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and
great nations.
        -- David Friedman
~
It would be thought a hard government that should tax
its people one tenth part.
        -- Benjamin Franklin
~
The price of liberty is, always has been, and always will be blood.
The person who is not willing to die for his liberty has already lost it
to the first scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to violate
that person's liberty.  Are you free?
        -- Andrew Ford
~
See, when the GOVERNMENT spends money, it creates jobs; whereas
when the money is left in the hands of TAXPAYERS, God only knows
what they do with it.  Bake it into pies, probably.
Anything to avoid creating jobs.
        -- Dave Barry
~
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with
an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
     -- H.L. Mencken
~
- "Are we to understand," asked the judge, "that you hold
your own interests above the interests of the public?"
- "I hold that such a question can never arise except
in a society of cannibals."
	-- Ayn Rand
~
All governments are more or less combinations against the
people. . .and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled. . .
the power of government can only be kept within its constituted
bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected
sentiment of the people.
        -- Benjamin Franklin Bache,
           in a Phildelphia Aurora editorial 1794
~
Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient
good to be bought at the price of liberty.
        -- Hillaire Belloc
~
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out
the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them;
and these will continue until they are resisted with either words
or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed
by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
        -- Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857
~
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists
precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do
so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
	-- Mikhail Bakunin
~
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their
will to power.		-- Aldous Huxley
~
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and
strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others,
because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
	-- Aldous Huxley
~
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has
never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable
are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
        -- H. L. Mencken
~
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
	-- Ramsey Clark
~
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing
that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
	-- Frederick Bastiat
~
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
	-- H.L. Mencken
~
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies
to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and
both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States
has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an
intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record
of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.
	--- H. L. Mencken
~
The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the
government off the backs of the people.
	-- Justice William O. Douglas
~
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best
state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one;
for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries *by a
government*, which we might expect in a country *without government*,
our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means
by which we suffer."
        -- Thomas Paine
~
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression: for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that
will reach unto himself.
        -- Thomas Paine
~
When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be drawn
to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless
the checks provided of one government on another, and will become
as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
        -- Thomas Jefferson, 1821
~
Freedom begins between the ears.
        -- Edward Abbey
~
Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism)
require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed
of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber,
the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.
        -- Edward Abbey
~
All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.
	-- Edward Abbey
~
As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of
diseases.	-- Edward Abbey
~
Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be
confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested.
If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against
clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of
Law.
        -- Edward Abbey
~
A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business;
supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the
National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.
        -- Edward Abbey
~
Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it
fulfills only a third of the role.
        -- Edward Abbey
~
"Say what you like about my bloody murderous government," I says,
"but don't insult me poor bleedin' country."
        -- Edward Abbey
~
"America is at that awkward stage.  It's too late to work
within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
-- Claire Wolfe
~
"Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public
is merely a number of individuals, the idea that 'the public interest'
supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning:
that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence
over the interests and rights of others."
	-- Ayn Rand
~
Don't think of it as `gun control', think of it as `victim
disarmament'. If we make enough laws, we can all be criminals.
~
The possession of arms by the people is the ultimate warrant
that government governs only with the consent of the governed.
        -- Jeff Snyder
~
As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust
its honest, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of
self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws disarming
honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master,
not the servant, of the people.
        -- Jeff Snyder
~
Probably fewer than 2% of handguns and well under 1% of all guns will
ever be involved in a violent crime. Thus, the problem of criminal gun
violence is concentrated within a very small subset of gun owners,
indicating that gun control aimed at the general population faces a
serious needle-in-the-haystack problem.
	-- Gary Kleck, "Point Blank: Handgun Violence In America"
~
When only cops have guns, it's called a "police state".
        -- Claire Wolfe, "101 Things To Do Until The Revolution"
~
Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike
the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid
to trust the people with arms.
	-- James Madison, The Federalist Papers
~
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be
properly armed."
        -- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188
~
"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look
upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
        -- Mohandas Gandhi, An Autobiography, pg 446
~
The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have
in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms,
or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements
makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends
to foment uprisings.
        -- Toyotomi Hideyoshi, dictator of Japan, August 1588
~
"One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes
without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an
offense to keep arms."
  -- Constitutional scholar and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, 1840
~
"The bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the
individual asserts both his social power and his participation in
politics as a responsible moral being..."
     -- J.G.A. Pocock, describing the beliefs of the founders of the U.S.
~
Men trained in arms from their infancy, and animated
by the love of liberty, will afford neither a cheap or easy conquest.
        -- From the Declaration of the Continental Congress, July 1775.
~
"As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives
[only] moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise,
and independence to the mind.  Games played with the ball
and others of that nature, are too violent for the body
and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun,
therefore, be the constant companion to your walks."
        -- Thomas Jefferson, writing to his teenaged nephew.
~
"Taking my gun away because I might shoot someone is like cutting
my tongue out because I might yell `Fire!' in a crowded theater."
        -- Peter Venetoklis
~
...Virtually never are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding people
against whom gun bans are aimed.  Almost without exception, murderers
are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime, substance
abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational violence
against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior, e.g.,
automobile and gun accidents."
        -- Don B. Kates, writing on statistical patterns in gun crime
~
The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been
considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic;
since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation
and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally,
even if these are successful in the first instance,
enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
        -- Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story of the John Marshall Court
~
Militias, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves and
include all men capable of bearing arms. [...] To preserve liberty
it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms
and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.
        -- Senator Richard Henry Lee, 1788,
           on "militia" in the 2nd Amendment
~
  "...quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est."
[...a sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand.]
        -- (Lucius Annaeus) Seneca "the Younger" (ca. 4 BC-65 AD),
~
False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand
real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience;
that would take fire from men because it burns, and water
because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils
except destruction.  The laws that forbid the carrying of arms
are laws of such a nature.  They disarm only those who are neither
inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
    -- Cesare Beccaria, as quoted by Thomas Jefferson's Commonplace book
~
No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people.
The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.
    -- "Political Disquisitions", a British republican tract of 1774-1775
~
Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation,
that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence?  Where is the
difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our
own direction, and having them under the management of Congress?  If
our defence be the *real* object of having those arms, in whose hands
can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in
our own hands?
        -- Patrick Henry, speech of June 9 1788
~
"To disarm the people... was the best and most effectual way
to enslave them."
        -- George Mason, speech of June 14, 1788
~
"The great object is, that every man be armed. [...]
Every one who is able may have a gun."
        -- Patrick Henry, speech of June 14 1788
~
Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders,
citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property,
as individuals, and their rights as freemen.
        -- "M.T. Cicero", in a newspaper letter of 1788
           touching the "militia" referred to in the Second
           Amendment to the Constitution.
~
That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize
Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights
of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United states
who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms...
     -- Samuel Adams, in "Phila. Independent Gazetteer", August 20, 1789
~
The danger (where there is any) from armed citizens,
is only to the *government*, not to *society*; and as long
as they have nothing to revenge in the government (which they cannot
have while it is in their own hands) there are many advantages in their
being accustomed to the use of arms, and no possible disadvantage.
     -- Joel Barlow, "Advice to the Privileged Orders", 1792-93
~
[The disarming of citizens] has a double effect, it palsies the hand
and brutalizes the mind: a habitual disuse of physical forces totally
destroys the moral [force]; and men lose at once the power of
protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their
oppression.
        -- Joel Barlow, "Advice to the Privileged Orders", 1792-93
~
Every Communist must grasp the truth, 'Political power grows out of
the barrel of a gun.'
    -- Mao Tse-tung, 1938, inadvertently endorsing the Second Amendment.
~
In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession
or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches
in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the
preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot
say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear
such an instrument. [...] The Militia comprised all males
physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense.
        -- Majority Supreme Court opinion in "U.S. vs. Miller" (1939)
~
An armed society is a polite society.  Manners are good when one
may have to back up his acts with his life.
        -- Robert A. Heinlein, "Beyond This Horizon", 1942
~
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit
the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms.  History teaches that all
conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have
prepared their own downfall by doing so.
        -- Adolph Hitler, April 11 1942.
~
The right to buy weapons is the right to be free.
        -- A.E. Van Vogt, "The Weapon Shops Of Isher", ASF December 1942
~
Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic
weapons.  A complex weapon makes the strong stronger,
while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it --
gives claws to the weak.
        -- George Orwell, "You and the Atom Bomb", 1945
~
Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government,
no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to
keep and bear arms.  [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is
just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard
against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which
historically has proved to be always possible.
        -- Hubert H. Humphrey, 1960
~
No matter how one approaches the figures, one is forced to the rather
startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much
less when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone,
convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without
restriction.  Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended,
perversely, with a far greater use of this weapon in crime than ever
before.
        -- Colin Greenwood, in the study "Firearms Control", 1972
~
    Let us hope our weapons are never needed --but do not forget what
the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An
armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the
final defense against tyranny.
    If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only
the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of
our rulers.  Only the government -- and a few outlaws.  I intend to
be among the outlaws.
        -- Edward Abbey, "Abbey's Road", 1979
~
If I were to select a jack-booted group of fascists who are
perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today,
I would pick BATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms].
        -- U.S. Representative John Dingell, 1980
~
.. a government and its agents are under no general duty to
provide public services, such as police protection, to any
particular individual citizen...
        -- Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. App.181)
~
The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and
wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United
States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and
court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates
that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen
to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.
   -- Report of the Subcommittee On The Constitution of the Committee On
      The Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, second session
      (February, 1982), SuDoc# Y4.J 89/2: Ar 5/5
~
In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment
protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while
it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms.
If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it
remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth
century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787
and 1791 states such a thesis.
        -- Stephen P. Halbrook, "That Every Man Be Armed", 1984
~
To make inexpensive guns impossible to get is to say that you're
putting a money test on getting a gun.  It's racism in its worst form.
    -- Roy Innis, president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 1988
~
I don't like the idea that the police department seems bent on keeping
a pool of unarmed victims available for the predations of the criminal
class.
         -- David Mohler, 1989, on being denied a carry permit in NYC
~
Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons.
If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power.
      -- Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the LA Times 15 Oct 1992
~
You know why there's a Second Amendment?  In case the government fails to
follow the first one.
     -- Rush Limbaugh, in a moment of unaccustomed profundity 17 Aug 1993
~
The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the
people at large or considered as individuals...  It establishes some
rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no
majority has a right to deprive them of.
         -- Albert Gallatin, Oct 7 1789
~
The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we
decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will
win and the decent people will lose.
        -- James Earl Jones
~
Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the
effect of such [gun control] laws is to place the individual at the
mercy of the state, unable to resist.
        -- Robert Anson Heinlein, 1949
~
Strict gun laws are about as effective as strict drug laws...It pains
me to say this, but the NRA seems to be right: The cities and states
that have the toughest gun laws have the most murder and mayhem.
        -- Mike Royko, Chicago Tribune
~
According to the National Crime Survey administered by the Bureau of
the Census and the National Institute of Justice, it was found that
only 12 percent of those who use a gun to resist assault are injured,
as are 17 percent of those who use a gun to resist robbery. These
percentages are 27 and 25 percent, respectively, if they passively
comply with the felon's demands. Three times as many were injured if
they used other means of resistance.
     -- G. Kleck, "Policy Lessons from Recent Gun Control Research,"
        Law and Contemporary Problems 49, no. 1. (Winter 1986.): 35-62.
~
If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation
should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of
criminal acts reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so
after a century and a half of trying -- that they must sweep under the
rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the
northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both
Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 -- establishes the repeated,
complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime.
        -- Senator Orrin Hatch, in a 1982 Senate Report
~
Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no
rule making or legislation which would abrogate them.
        -- Miranda vs. Arizona, 384 US 436 p. 491
~
Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they
are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America
cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword, because the people are armed,
and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops.
	-- Noah Webster
~
[President Clinton] boasts about 186,000 people denied firearms under
the Brady Law rules.  The Brady Law has been in force for three years.
In that time, they have prosecuted seven people and put three of them in
prison.  You know, the President has entertained more felons than that at
fundraising coffees in the White House, for Pete's sake."
	-- Charlton Heston, FOX News Sunday, 18 May 1997
~
(Those) who are trying to read the Second Amendment out
of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right (are)
courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means
to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.
	-- Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School
~
The right of self-defense is the first law of nature: in most
governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right
within the narrowest limits possible.  Wherever standing armies
are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear
arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited,
liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of
destruction."
	-- Henry St. George Tucker (in Blackstone's Commentaries)
~
"Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people,
and therefore deprive them of arms."
	--Aristotle
~
The biggest hypocrites on gun control are those who live in upscale
developments with armed security guards -- and who want to keep other
people from having guns to defend themselves.  But what about
lower-income people living in high-crime, inner city neighborhoods?
Should such people be kept unarmed and helpless, so that limousine
liberals can 'make a statement' by adding to the thousands of gun laws
already on the books?"
	--Thomas Sowell
~
"Boys who own legal firearms have much lower rates of delinquency and
drug use and are even slightly less delinquent than nonowners of guns."
      -- U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of
         Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,
         NCJ-143454, "Urban Delinquency and Substance Abuse," August 1995.
~
Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and
strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a
woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.
	-- L. Neil Smith
~
A man with a gun is a citizen.  A man without a gun is a subject.
~
"Gun control" is a job-safety program for criminals.
~
During waves of terror attacks, Israel's national police chief will
call on all concealed-handgun permit holders to make sure they carry
firearms at all times, and Israelis have many examples where
concealed permit holders have saved lives.
	-- John R. Lott
~
"Historical examination of the right to bear arms, from English
antecedents to the drafting of the Second Amendment, bears proof that
the right to bear arms has consistently been, and should still be,
construed as an individual right."
     -- U.S. District Judge Sam Cummings, in re U.S. vs Emerson (1999).
~
Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.
~
Courage is resistance of fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
~
No one who's seen it in action can say the phrase "government help"
without either laughing or crying.
~
What if you were an idiot, and what if you were a member of Congress?
But I repeat myself.
        -- Mark Twain
~
The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His
failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
        -- H.L. Mencken
~
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
	-- T.S. Eliot
~
'Faith' means not _wanting_ to know what is true.
	-- Nietzsche, Der Antichrist
~
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test
a man's character, give him power.
	-- Abraham Lincoln
~
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my
contempt.  He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the
spinal cord would fully suffice.
	-- Albert Einstein
~
It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a
commodity.  Or, to state the modern case with more precision,
that works of art exist simultaneously in two "economies,"
a market economy and a gift economy.  Only one of these is essential,
however: a work of art can survive without the market,
but where there is no gift there is no art.
   -- Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
~
"If I must write the truth, I am disposed to avoid every assembly of
bishops; for of no synod have I seen a profitable end, but rather an
addition to than a diminution of evils; for the love of strife and the
thirst for superiority are beyond the power of words to express."
	-- Father Gregory Nazianzen, 381 AD
~
The two pillars of `political correctness' are,
  a) willful ignorance, and
  b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth
	-- George MacDonald Fraser
~
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are
impotent in the face of hope and joy.
	-- P. J. O'Rourke
~
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism
is its adherents.
	-- George Orwell
~
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of
slander on the poor.
	-- H. L. Mencken
~
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence
of the improbable...A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or
never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a
mere ass: he is actually ill.
        -- H. L. Mencken
~
To stay young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to
unlearn old falsehoods.
	-- Lazarus Long
~
What is a magician but a practicing theorist?
	-- Obi-Wan Kenobi, 'Return of the Jedi'
~
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give
orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem,
pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently,
die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
	-- Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love"
~
The same applies for other kinds of long-lasting low-level pain. [...]
The body's response to being jabbed, pierced, and cut is to produce
endorphins. [...]  So here's my programme for breaking that cycle of
dependency on Windows: get left arm tattooed with dragon motif, buy a
crate of Jamaican Hot! Pepper Sauce, get nipples pierced.  With any
luck that will produce enough endorphins to make Windows completely
redundant, and I can then upgrade to Linux and get on with things.
	-- Pieter Hintjens
~
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the
individual who can labor in freedom.
	-- Albert Einstein, in H. Eves Return to Mathematical Circles,
           Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1988.
~
  "You have taught us much. Come with us and join the movement."
  "This movement of yours, does it have slogans?" inquired the Chink.
  "Right on!" they cried. And they quoted him some.
  "Your movement, does it have a flag?" asked the Chink.
  "You bet!" and they described their emblem.
  "And does your movement have leaders?"
  "Great leaders."
  "Then shove it up your butts," said the Chink.
  "I have taught you nothing."

	-- Tom Robbins, "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues"
~
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord,
make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
	--Voltaire
~
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men
purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.
	--Martin Luther King, Jr.
~
When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.
                -- Steve Hoflich on compl.lang.c++
~
If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
		-- Voltaire
~
There's a tendency today to absolve individuals of
moral responsibility and treat them as victims of
social circumstance.  You buy that, you pay with your
soul.
		-Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
~
Vegetables are not food; vegetables are what food eats.
Fruit are vegetables that fool you by tasting good.
Fish are fast-moving vegetables.
Mushrooms are what grows on vegetables when food's done with them.
                -- Meat Eater's Credo
~
The men and women who founded our country knew, by experience, that there
are times when the free person's answer to oppressive government has to be
delivered with a bullet.  Thus, the right to bear arms is not just *a*
freedom; it's the mother of all freedoms.  Don't let them disarm you!
        -- Eric S. Raymond
~
Hoplophobia (n.): The irrational fear of weapons, correctly described by
Freud as "a sign of emotional and sexual immaturity".  Hoplophobia, like
homophobia, is a displacement symptom; hoplophobes fear their own
"forbidden" feelings and urges to commit violence.  This would be
harmless, except that they project these feelings onto others.  The
sequelae of this neurosis include irrational and dangerous behaviors
such as passing "gun-control" laws and trashing the Constitution.
	-- Eric S. Raymond
~
Never trust a man who praises compassion while pointing a gun at you.
        -- Eric S. Raymond
~
There's a truism that the road to Hell is often paved with
good intentions. The corollary is that evil is best known
not by its motives but by its *methods*.
        -- Eric S. Raymond
~
The kind of charity you can force out of people nourishes
about as much as the kind of love you can buy --- and spreads even
nastier diseases.
        -- Eric S. Raymond
~
The abortion rights and gun control debates are twin aspects of a deeper
question --- does an individual ever have the right to make decisions
that are literally life-or-death?  And if not the individual, who does?
        -- Eric S. Raymond
~
Our society won't be truly free until "None of the Above"
is always an option.
        -- Eric S. Raymond
~
Alcohol still kills more people every year than all `illegal' drugs
put together, and Prohibition only made it worse.
Oppose the War On Some Drugs!
        -- Eric S. Raymond
~
Rapists just *love* unarmed women. And the politicians who disarm them.
        -- Eric S. Raymond
~
Everything you know is wrong.
But some of it is a useful first approximation.
        -- Eric S. Raymond
~
I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as
air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day
will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally
gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers
and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
    -- Watson, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes -- it approaches to
cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch
of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you
understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an
accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would
take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion
for definite and exact knowledge."
    -- Stamford, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"How are you?" he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for
which I should hardly have given him credit. "You have been in
Afghanistan, I perceive."
  -- Sherlock Holmes's first words to Watson, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary
literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to
nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest
way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a
climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the
Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any
civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware
that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an
extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
    -- Watson, describing Holmes in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is
like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such
furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort
that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to
him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other
things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now
the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into
his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him
in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in
the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room
has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there
comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something
that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not
to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say
that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make
a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"From a drop of water," said the writer, "a logician could infer the
possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard
of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which
is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other
arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be
acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow
any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. Before
turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present
the greatest difficulties, let the enquirer begin by mastering more
elementary problems. Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a
glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or
profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem,
it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to
look and what to look for. By a man's finger nails, by his coat-
sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser knees, by the callosities of his
forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuffs -- by each
of these things a man's calling is plainly revealed. That all united
should fail to enlighten the competent enquirer in any case is almost
inconceivable."
    -- From "The Book of Life", an article by Holmes quoted in
       "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he
remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply
to detective work."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless
skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and
expose every inch of it."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"Oh, bless you, it doesn't matter in the least. If the man is caught,
it will be *on account* of their exertions; if he escapes, it will be
*in spite* of their exertions. It's heads I win and tails you lose.
Whatever they do, they will have followers. _'Un sot trouve toujours
un plus sot qui l'admire.'_"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it
presents no new or special features from which deductions may be
drawn."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"He made the country down in Illinois, and He made the Missouri," the
little girl continued. "I guess somebody else made the country in
these parts. It's not nearly so well done. They forgot the water and
the trees."
    -- Lucy Ferrier, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence," returned my
companion, bitterly. "The question is, what can you make people
believe that you have done."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
"In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to
reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very
easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the every-day affairs
of life it is more useful to reason forwards, and so the other comes
to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one
who can reason analytically."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"
~
He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he
had opened. "It is cocaine," he said, -- "a seven-percent solution.
Would you care to try it?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me
work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate
analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then
with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence.
I crave for mental exaltation."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection. When Gregson
or Lestrade or Athelney Jones are out of their depths -- which, by the
way, is their normal state -- the matter is laid before me."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated
in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge
it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you
worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of
Euclid."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
I made no remark, however, but sat nursing my wounded leg. I had a
Jezail bullet through it some time before, and, though it did not
prevent me from walking, it ached wearily at every change of the
weather.
    -- Watson, "The Sign of the Four"
~
"Oh, he rates my assistance too highly," said Sherlock Holmes,
lightly. "He has considerable gifts himself. He possesses two out of
the three qualities necessary for the ideal detective. He has the
power of observation and that of deduction. He is only wanting in
knowledge; and that may come in time."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"Oh, didn't you know?" he cried, laughing. "Yes, I have been guilty of
several monographs. They are all upon technical subjects. Here, for
example, is one 'Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various
Tobaccoes.' In it I enumerate a hundred and forty forms of cigar-,
cigarette-, and pipe-tobacco, with colored plates illustrating the
difference in the ash. It is a point which is continually turning up
in criminal trials, and which is sometimes of supreme importance as a
clue. If you can say definitely, for example, that some murder has
been done by a man who was smoking an Indian lunkah, it obviously
narrows your field of search. To the trained eye there is as much
difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff
of bird's-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"Here is my monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks
upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses. Here,
too, is a curious little work upon the influence of a trade upon the
form of the hand, with lithotypes of the hands of slaters, sailors,
corkcutters, compositors, weavers, and diamond-polishers. That is a
matter of great practical interest to the scientific detective, --
especially in cases of unclaimed bodies, or in discovering the
antecedents of criminals. But I weary you with my hobby."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the
truth."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"No, no: I never guess. It is a shocking habit, -- destructive to the
logical faculty."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brain-work. What else is
there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary,
dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the
street and drifts across the dun-colored houses. What could be more
hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers,
doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is
commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those
which are commonplace have any function upon earth."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
He smiled gently. "It is of the first importance," he said, "not to
allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to
me a mere unit, -- a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are
antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning
woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for
their insurance-money, and the most repellant man of my acquaintance
is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon
the London poor."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
I endeavored to cheer and amuse her by reminiscences of my adventures
in Afghanistan; but, to tell the truth, I was myself so excited at our
situation and so curious as to our destination that my stories were
slightly involved. To this day she declares that I told her one moving
anecdote as to how a musket looked into my tent at the dead of night,
and how I fired a double-barrelled tiger cub at it.
    -- Watson, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"My health is somewhat fragile," he remarked, as he led the way down
the passage. "I am compelled to be a valetudinarian."
    -- Thaddeus Sholto, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the
impossible whatever remains, *however improbable*, must be the truth?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
  "What do you think of this, Holmes? Sholto was, on his own
confession, with his brother last night. The brother died in a fit, on
which Sholto walked off with the treasure. How's that?"
  "On which the dead man very considerately got up and locked the door
on the inside."
  "Hum! There's a flaw there."
    -- Athelney Jones and Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"He makes one curious but profound remark. It is that the chief proof
of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.
It argues, you see, a power of comparison and of appreciation which is
in itself a proof of nobility. There is much food for thought in
Richter."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"I would not tell them too much," said Holmes. "Women are never to be
entirely trusted, -- not the best of them."
    -- From "The Sign of the Four"
~
"Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little
immortal spark concealed about him. You would not think it, to look at
them. There is no a priori probability about it. A strange enigma is
man!"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks
that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the
aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example,
never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with
precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but
percentages remain constant. So says the statistician."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
"Not at all. I think she is one of the most charming young ladies I
ever met, and might have been most useful in such work as we have been
doing. She had a decided genius that way: witness the way in which she
preserved that Agra plan from all the other papers of her father. But
love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to
that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never
marry myself, lest I bias my judgment."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
  "The division seems rather unfair," I remarked. "You have done all
the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the
credit, pray what remains for you?"
  "For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine-
bottle." And he stretched his long white hand up for it.
    -- Watson and Holmes, in "The Sign of the Four"
~
To Sherlock Holmes she is always *the* woman.
    -- From "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All
emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold,
precise but admirably balanced mind.
    -- From "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine
that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself
in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with
a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer --
excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for
the trained teasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate
and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor
which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a
sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses,
would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as
his.
    -- From "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away
from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred
interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master
of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention,
while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole
Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among
his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and
ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own
keen nature.
    -- From "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
"Quite so," he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself
down into an armchair. "You see, but you do not observe. The
distinction is clear."
    -- From "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
  "For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from
the hall to this room."
  "Frequently."
  "How often?"
  "Well, some hundreds of times."
  "Then how many are there?"
  "How many? I don't know."
  "Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is
just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I
have both seen and observed."
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Watson, in "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
"I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one
has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories,
instead of theories to suit facts."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
"And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar
construction of the sentence -- 'This account of you we have from all
quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written
that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
"Kindly look her up in my index, Doctor," murmured Holmes without
opening his eyes. For many years he had adopted a system of docketing
all paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it was difficult to
name a subject or a person on which he could not at once furnish
information. In this case I found her biography sandwiched in between
that of a Hebrew rabbi and that of a staff-commander who had written a
monograph upon the deep-sea fishes.
    -- From "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his
manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he
assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute
reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.
    -- From "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
"When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at
once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly
overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it.
In the case of the Darlington substitution scandal it was of use to
me, and also in the Arnsworth Castle business. A married woman grabs
at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
  "What a woman -- oh, what a woman!" cried the King of Bohemia, when
we had all three read this epistle. "Did I not tell you how quick and
resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it
not a pity that she was not on my level?"
  "From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very
different level to your Majesty," said Holmes coldly.
    -- From "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of
Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by
a woman's wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but
I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler,
or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honorable
title of the woman.
    -- From "A Scandal in Bohemia"
~
"You have heard me remark that the strangest and most unique things
are very often connected not with the larger but with the smaller
crimes, and occasionally, indeed, where there is room for doubt
whether any positive crime has been committed."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Red Headed League"
~
"I have nothing to do today. My practice is never very absorbing."
    -- Watson, in "The Red Headed League"
~
"As a rule, when I have heard some slight indication of the course of
events, I am able to guide myself by the thousands of other similar
cases which occur to my memory. In the present instance I am forced to
admit that the facts are, to the best of my belief, unique."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Red Headed League"
~
"I begin to think, Watson," said Holmes, "that I make a mistake in
explaining. 'Omne ignotum pro magnifico,' you know, and my poor little
reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I am so candid."
    -- From "The Red Headed League"
~
"'You will, however, I am sure, excuse me for taking an obvious
precaution.' With that he seized my hair in both his hands, and tugged
until I yelled with the pain. 'There is water in your eyes,' said he
as he released me. 'I perceive that all is as it should be. But we
have to be careful, for we have twice been deceived by wigs and once
by paint. I could tell you tales of cobbler's wax which would disgust
you with human nature.'"
    -- Jabez Wilson, in "The Red Headed League"
~
"Eight weeks passed away like this, and I had written about Abbots and
Archery and Armour and Architecture and Attica, and hoped with
diligence that I might get on to the B's before very long. It cost me
something in foolscap, and I had pretty nearly filled a shelf with my
writings."
    -- Jabez Wilson, in "The Red Headed League"
~
"As far as you are personally concerned," remarked Holmes, "I do not
see that you have any grievance against this extraordinary league. On
the contrary, you are, as I understand, richer by some 30 pounds, to
say nothing of the minute knowledge which you have gained on every
subject which comes under the letter A."
    -- From "The Red Headed League"
~
"As a rule," said Holmes, "the more bizarre a thing is the less
mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes
which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most
difficult to identify."
    -- From "The Red Headed League"
~
  "What are you going to do, then?" I asked.
  "To smoke," he answered. "It is quite a three pipe problem, and I
beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes."
    -- From "The Red Headed League"
~
"I observe that there is a good deal of German music on the programme,
which is rather more to my taste than Italian or French. It is
introspective, and I want to introspect."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Red Headed League"
~
  "Mr. Wilson's assistant counts for a good deal in this mystery of
the Red Headed League. I am sure that you inquired your way merely in
order that you might see him."
  "Not him."
  "What then?"
  "The knees of his trousers."
    -- Watson and Holmes, in "The Red Headed League"
~
My friend was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very
capable perfomer but a composer of no ordinary merit. All the
afternoon he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness,
gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music, while his
gently smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes were as unlike those
of Holmes, the sleuth-hound, Holmes the relentless, keen-witted, ready
-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive.
    -- From "The Red Headed League"
~
In his singular character the dual nature alternately asserted itself,
and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often
thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which
occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him
from extreme languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was
never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been
lounging in his armchair amid his improvisations and his black-letter
editions. Then it was that the lust of the chase would suddenly come
upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning power would rise to the
level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with his methods
would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that of
other mortals. When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music
at St. James's Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon
those whom he had set himself to hunt down.
    -- From "The Red Headed League"
~
I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbors, but I was always
oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with
Sherlock Holmes.
    -- Watson, in "The Red Headed League"
~
"You may place considerable confidence in Mr. Holmes, sir," said the
police agent loftily. "He has his own little methods, which are, if he
won't mind my saying so, just a little too theoretical and fantastic,
but he has the makings of a detective in him. It is not too much to
say that once or twice, as in that business of the Sholto murder and
the Agra treasure, he has been more nearly correct than the official
force."
    -- Peter Jones, in "The Red Headed League"
~
"You reasoned it out beautifully," I exclaimed in unfeigned
admiration. "It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true."
    -- Watson, in "The Red Headed League"
~
"It saved me from ennui," he answered, yawning. "Alas! I already feel
it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape
from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to
do so."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Red Headed League"
~
"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the
fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger
than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to
conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.
If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great
city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which
are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-
purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation,
and leading to the most outr results, it would make all fiction with
its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and
unprofitable."
    -- From "A Case of Identity"
~
"We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits,
and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor
artistic."
    -- Watson, in "A Case of Identity"
~
"Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Case of Identity"
~
"The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the
conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of
winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them
at his wife."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Case of Identity"
~
"It was most suggestive," said Holmes. "It has long been an axiom of
mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."
    -- From "A Case of Identity"
~
"The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of
interest."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Case of Identity"
~
"'Pon my word, Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. You have
really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed
everything of importance, but you have hit upon the method, and you
have a quick eye for color. Never trust to general impressions, my
boy, but concentrate yourself upon details."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Case of Identity"
~
  A formidable array of bottles and test-tubes, with the pungent
cleanly smell of hydrochloric acid, told me that he had spent his day
in the chemical work which was so dear to him.
  "Well, have you solved it?" I asked as I entered.
  "Yes. It was the bisulphate of baryta."
    -- From "A Case of Identity"
~
"If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old
Persian saying, 'There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and
danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.' There is as
much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Case of Identity"
~
"Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing," answered Holmes
thoughtfully. "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."
    -- From "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"
~
"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact," he answered,
laughing. "Besides, we may chance to hit upon some other obvious facts
which may have been by no means obvious to Mr. Lestrade. You know me
too well to think that I am boasting when I say that I shall either
confirm or destroy his theory by means which he is quite incapable of
employing, or even of understanding."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"
~
"You know my method. It is founded upon the observance of trifles."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"
~
"And now here is my pocket Petrarch, and not another word shall I say
of this case until we are on the scene of action."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"
~
  "And the murderer?"
  "Is a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-
soled shooting-boots and a gray cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a
cigar-holder, and carries a blunt pen-knife in his pocket. There are
several other indications, but these may be enough to aid us in our
search."
    -- Lestrade and Holmes, in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"
~
"I have, as you know, devoted some attention to this, and written a
little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe,
cigar, and cigarette tobacco."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"
~
"God help us!" said Holmes after a long silence. "Why does fate play
such tricks with poor, helpless worms? I never hear of such a case as
this that I do not think of Baxter's words, and say, 'There, but for
the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes.'"
    -- From "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"
~
All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the
windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we
were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of
life and to recognize the presence of those great elemental forces
which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like
untamed beasts in a cage.
    -- From "The Five Orange Pips"
~
  "I have come for advice."
  "That is easily got."
  "And help."
  "That is not always so easy."
    -- John Openshaw and Holmes, in "The Five Orange Pips"
~
Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the arms of
his chair, with his finger-tips together. "The ideal reasoner," he
remarked, "would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its
bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up
to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier
could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a
single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in
a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other
ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which
the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study
which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of
their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is
necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilize all the facts
which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you
will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these
days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare
accomplishment. It is not so impossible, however, that a man should
possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work,
and this I have endeavored in my case to do."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Five Orange Pips"
~
"Well," he said, "I say now, as I said then, that a man should keep
his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is
likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his
library, where he can get it if he wants it."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Five Orange Pips"
~
"No, no. No crime," said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. "Only one of those
whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four
million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few
square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of
humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take
place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be
striking and bizarre without being criminal. We have already had
experience of such."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"
~
"The question for us now to solve is the sequence of events leading
from a rifled jewel-case at one end to the crop of a goose in
Tottenham Court Road at the other."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"
~
When the commissionaire had gone, Holmes took up the stone and held it
against the light. "It's a bonny thing," said he. "Just see how it
glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime.
Every good stone is. They are the devil's pet baits. In the larger and
older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"
~
  "You? Who are you? How could you know anything of the matter?"
  "My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other
people don't know."
    -- James Ryder and Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"
~
"Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and
its solution is its own reward."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"
~
On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have
during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock
Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange,
but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of
his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate
himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual,
and even the fantastic.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"
~
"It's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brain to crime
it is the worst of all."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"
~
"When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has
nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads
of their profession."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"
~
"Then it flashed through my mind that the pain of my death would
depend very much upon the position in which I met it. If I lay on my
face the weight would come upon my spine, and I shuddered to think of
that dreadful snap. Easier the other way, perhaps; and yet, had I the
nerve to lie and look up at that deadly black shadow wavering down
upon me?"
    -- Victor Hatherley, in "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"
~
  "Well," said our engineer ruefully as we took our seats to return
once more to London, "it has been a pretty business for me! I have
lost my thumb and I have lost a fifty-guinea fee, and what have I
gained?"
  "Experience," said Holmes, laughing. "Indirectly it may be of value,
you know; you have only to put it into words to gain the reputation of
being excellent company for the remainder of your existence."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"
~
I had remained indoors all day, for the weather had taken a sudden
turn to rain, with high autumnal winds, and the Jezail bullet which I
had brought back in one of my limbs as a relic of my Afghan campaign
throbbed with dull persistence.
    -- Watson, in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"
~
"This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call
upon a man either to be bored or to lie."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"
~
  "They have been identified as her clothes, and it seemed to me that
if the clothes were there the body would not be far off."
  "By the same brilliant reasoning, every man's body is to be found in
the neighborhood of his wardrobe."
    -- Lestrade and Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"
~
"Still, if I had married Lord St. Simon, of course I'd have done my
duty by him. We can't command our love, but we can our actions."
    -- Hatty Doran, in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"
~
"It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of
those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a
minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being
some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which
shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"
~
"Draw your chair up and hand me my violin, for the only problem we
have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal
evenings."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"
~
"I think that we may safely say," returned Holmes, "that she is
wherever Sir George Burnwell is. It is equally certain, too, that
whatever her sins are, they will soon receive a more than sufficient
punishment."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet"
~
"To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes,
tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, "it is
frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the
keenest pleasure is to be derived."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
"You have erred, perhaps," he observed, taking up a glowing cinder
with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which
was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than
a meditative mood -- "you have erred perhaps in attempting to put
color and life into each of your statements instead of confining
yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from
cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the
thing."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
"If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal
thing -- a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare.
Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you
should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of
lectures into a series of tales."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
"Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant
public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by
his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and
deduction!"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
"Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and
originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating
into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to
young ladies from boarding-schools."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
  "If you should find yourself in doubt or in danger--"
  "Danger! What danger do you foresee?"
  Holmes shook his head gravely. "It would cease to be a danger if we
could define it," said he.
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Violet Hunter, in
       "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a
mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with
reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered
houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the
only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of
the impunity with which crime may be committed there."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
"The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot
accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured
child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and
indignation among the neighbors, and then the whole machinery of
justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going,
and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at
these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part
with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds
of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in,
year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who
appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have
had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the
danger."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
  "What *can* be the matter, then? Can you suggest no explanation?"
  "I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would
cover the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is correct
can only be determined by the fresh information which we shall no
doubt find waiting for us."
    -- Watson and Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
"Mrs. Rucastle seemed to me to be colorless in mind as well as in
feature. She impressed me neither favorably nor the reverse. She was a
nonentity."
    -- Violet Hunter, in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
"My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as
to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don't you
see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my
first real insight into the character of parents by studying their
children. This child's disposition is abnormally cruel, merely for
cruelty's sake, and whether he derives this from his smiling father,
as I should suspect, or from his mother, it bodes evil for the poor
girl who is in their power."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
As to Miss Violet Hunter, my friend Holmes, rather to my
disappointment, manifested no further interest in her when once she
had ceased to be the centre of one of his problems, and she is now the
head of a private school at Walsall, where I believe that she has met
with considerable success.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"
~
  "We are going well," said he, looking out the window and glancing at
his watch. "Our rate at present is fifty-three and a half miles an
hour."
  "I have not observed the quarter-mile posts," said I.
  "Nor have I. But the telegraph posts upon this line are sixty yards
apart, and the calculation is a simple one."
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Watson, in "Silver Blaze"
~
"Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "Silver Blaze"
~
"It is one of those cases where the art of the reasoner should be used
rather for the sifting of details than for the acquiring of fresh
evidence."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "Silver Blaze"
~
"The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete and of such personal
importance to so many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of
surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the
framework of fact -- of absolute undeniable fact -- from the
embellishments of theorists and reporters."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "Silver Blaze"
~
"See the value of imagination," said Holmes. "It is the one quality
which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon
the supposition, and find ourselves justified. Let us proceed."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "Silver Blaze"
~
  "At least you have his assurance that your horse will run," said I.
  "Yes, I have his assurance," said the Colonel, with a shrug of his
shoulders. "I should prefer to have the horse."
    -- Watson and Colonel Ross, in "Silver Blaze"
~
  "Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
  "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
  "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
  "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
    -- Inspector Gregory and Holmes, in "Silver Blaze"
~
And this not so much for the sake of his reputations -- for, indeed,
it was when he was at his wits' end that his energy and his
versatility were most admirable -- but because where he failed it
happened too often that no one else succeeded, and that the tale was
left forever without a conclusion.
    -- From "The Yellow Face"
~
Sherlock Holmes was a man who seldom took exercise for exercise's
sake. Few men were capable of greater muscular effort, and he was
undoubtedly one of the finest boxers of his weight that I have ever
seen; but he looked upon aimless bodily exertion as a waste of energy,
and he seldom bestirred himself save when there was some professional
object to be served.
    -- From "The Yellow Face"
~
  "My dear Mr. Grant Munro--" began Holmes.
  Our visitor sprang from his char. "What!" he cried, "you know my
mane?"
  "If you wish to preserve your incognito,' said Holmes, smiling, "I
would suggest that you cease to write your name upon the lining of
your hat, or else that you turn the crown towards the person whom you
are addressing."
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Grant Munro, in "The Yellow Face"
~
"Upon my word, Watson, there is something very attractive about that
livid face at the window, and I would not have missed the case for
worlds."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Yellow Face"
~
"Any truth is better than indefinite doubt."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Yellow Face"
~
"Watson," said he, "if it should ever strike you that I am getting a
little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case
than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be
infinitely obliged to you."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Yellow Face"
~
The public not unnaturally goes on the principle that he who would
heal others must himself be whole, and looks askance at the curative
powers of the man whose own case is beyond the reach of his drugs.
    -- Watson, in "The Stock-Brocker's Clerk"
~
"I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain," said he.
"Results without causes are much more impressive."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Stock-Brocker's Clerk"
~
"I sent in my testimonial and application, but without the least hope
of getting it. Back came an answer by return, saying that if I would
appear next Monday I might take over my new duties at once, provided
that my appearance was satisfactory. No one knows how these things are
worked. Some people say that the manager just plunges his hand into
the heap and takes the first that comes."
    -- Hall Pycroft, in "The Stock-Brocker's Clerk"
~
"Human nature is a strange mixture, Watson. You see that even a
villain and murderer can inspire such affection that his brother turns
to suicide when he learns that his neck is forfeited."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Stock-Brocker's Clerk"
~
"I don't know how you manage this, Mr. Holmes, but it seems to me that
all the detectives of fact and of fancy would be children in your
hands."
    -- Trevor senior, in "The 'Gloria Scott'"
~
An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend
Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was
the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he
affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in
his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a
fellow-lodger to distraction.
    -- From "The Musgrave Ritual"
~
The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a
natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than
befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a
man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe
end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed
by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I
begin to give myself virtuous airs.
    -- Watson, in "The Musgrave Ritual"
~
I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an
open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would
sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer
cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.
R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere
nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
    -- Watson, in "The Musgrave Ritual"
~
Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics
which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning
up in the butter-dish or in even less desirable places.
    -- From "The Musgrave Ritual"
~
"It is rather an absurd business, this ritual of ours," he answered.
"But it has at least the saving grace of antiquity to excuse it."
    -- Reginald Musgrave, in "The Musgrave Ritual"
~
"You know my methods in such cases, Watson. I put myself in the man's
place and, having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how
I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances. In this
case the matter was simplified by Brunton's intelligence being quite
first-rate, so that it was unnecessary to make any allowance for the
personal equation, as the astronomers have dubbed it."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Musgrave Ritual"
~
"It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to
recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which
vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead
of being concentrated."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Reigate Squires"
~
  "Excellent!" I cried.
  "Elementary," said he.
  -- Watson and Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Crooked Man"
~
A depleted bank account had caused me to postpone my holiday, and as
to my companion, neither the country nor the sea presented the
slightest attraction to him. He loved to lie in the very centre of
five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running
through them, responsive to every little rumor or suspicion of
unsolved crime. Appreciation of Nature found no place among his many
gifts, and his only change was when he turned his mind from the evil-
doer of the town to track down his brother of the country.
    -- Watson, in "The Adventure of the Resident Patient"
~
"But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have
come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French
artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"
~
"My dear Watson," said he, "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty
among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly
as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure
from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"
~
"I said that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the
art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an arm-chair,
my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But
he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way
to verify his own solution, and would rather be considered wrong than
take the trouble to prove himself right."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"
~
"There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some
from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet
they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals.
It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started,
and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town. No
member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in
the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed,
and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render
the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders,
and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"
~
Mr. Melas, however, still lived, and in less than an hour, with the
aid of ammonia and brandy I had the satisfaction of seeing him open
his eyes, and of knowing that my hand had drawn him back from that
dark valley in which all paths meet.
    -- Watson, in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"
~
"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,"
said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built
up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the
goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other
things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary
for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra.
Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition
of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that
we have much to hope from the flowers."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"
~
  "You suspect some one?"
  "I suspect myself."
  "What!"
  "Of coming to conclusions too rapidly."
    -- Annie Harrison and Sherlock Holmes, in
       "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"
~
  "Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the
slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea."
  "The board-schools."
  "Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds
of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise,
better England of the future."
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Watson,
       in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"
~
Standing on the run between us, with his slight, tall figure, his
sharp features, thoughtful face, and curling hair prematurely tinged
with gray, he seemed to represent that not too common type, a nobleman
who is in truth noble.
    -- The description of Lord Holdhurst,
       in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"
~
It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last
words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my
friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.
    -- Opening line of "The Final Problem"
~
  "You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?" said he.
  "Never."
  "Aye, there's the genius and the wonder of the thing!" he cried.
"The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That's what
puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime."
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Watson, in "The Final Problem"
~
"As you are aware, Watson, there is no one who knows the higher
criminal world of London so well as I do. For years past I have
continually been conscious of some power behind the malefactor, some
deep organizing power which forever stands in the way of the law, and
throws its shield over the wrong-doer. Again and again in cases of the
most varying sorts -- forgery cases, robberies, murders -- I have felt
the presence of this force, and I have deduced its action in many of
those undiscovered crimes in which I have not been personally
consulted. For years I have endeavored to break through the veil which
shrouded it, and at last the time came when I seized my thread and
followed it, until it led me, after a thousand cunning windings,
to ex-Professor Moriarty of mathematical celebrity."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Final Problem"
~
"He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that
is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is
a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the
first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its
web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every
quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his
agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be
done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a
man to be removed -- the word is passed to the Professor, the matter
is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case
money is found for his bail or his defence. But the central power
which uses the agent is never caught -- never so much as suspected."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Final Problem"
~
"'You crossed my path on the 4th of January,' said he. 'On the 23d you
incommoded me; by the middle of February I was seriously
inconvenienced by you; at the end of March I was absolutely hampered
in my plans; and now, at the close of April, I find myself placed in
such a position through your continual persecution that I am in
positive danger of losing my liberty. The situation is becoming an
impossible one.'"
    -- Professor Moriarty, speaking to Sherlock Holmes
       in "The Final Problem"
~
  "'Danger is part of my trade,' I remarked."
  "'That is not danger,' said he. 'It is inevitable destruction. You
stand in the way not merely of an individual, but of a might
organization, the full extent of which you, with all your cleverness,
have been unable to realize. You must stand clear, Mr. Holmes, or be
trodden under foot.'"
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, in "The Final Problem"
~
"Now I have come round to you, and on my way I was attacked by a rough
with a bludgeon. I knocked him down, and the police have him in
custody; but I can tell you with the most absolute confidence that no
possible connection will ever be traced between the gentleman upon
whose front teeth I have barked my knuckles and the retiring
mathematical coach, who is, I dare say, working out problems upon a
black-board ten miles away."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Final Problem"
~
"I think that I may go so far as to say, Watson, that I have not lived
wholly in vain," he remarked. "If my record were closed to-night I
could still survey it with equanimity. The air of London is the
sweeter for my presence. In over a thousand cases I am not aware that
I have ever used my powers upon the wrong side. Of late I have been
tempted to look into the problems furnished by nature rather than
those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society
is responsible."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Final Problem"
~
"I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so
good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually
underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself
luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without
possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, to Watson, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon
the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether
for good or ill. What does Dr. James Mortimer, the man of science, ask
of Sherlock Holmes, the specialist in crime? Come in!"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so
dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development.
Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your
parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is
available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is
not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your
skull."
    -- Dr Mortimer, to Sherlock Holmes,
       in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"To that Providence, my sons, I hereby commend you, and I counsel you
by way of caution to forbear from crossing the moor in those dark
hours when the powers of evil are exalted."
    -- Hugo Baskerville's document, read by Dr Mortimer
       in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"
    -- Dr Mortimer, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world," said he.
"In a modest way I have combated evil, but to take on the Father of
Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
  "Caught cold, Watson?" said he.
  "No, it's this poisonous atmosphere."
  "I suppose it is pretty thick, now that you mention it."
  "Thick! It is intolerable."
  "Open the window, then!"
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Watson,
       in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever
observes."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
  "Where do you think that I have been?"
  "A fixture also."
  "On the contrary, I have been to Devonshire."
  "In spirit?"
  "Exactly. My body has remained in this armchair and has, I regret to
observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an
incredible amount of tobacco."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"After you left I sent down to Stamford's for the Ordnance map of this
portion of the moor, and my spirit has hovered over it all day. I
flatter myself that I could find my way about."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
  "Yes, the setting is a worthy one. If the devil did desire to have a
hand in the affairs of men--"
  "Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation."
  "The devil's agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Watson,
       in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"It is a singular thing, but I find that a concentrated atmosphere
helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length
of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my
convictions."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"There is as much difference to my eyes between the leaded bourgeois
type of a Times article and the slovenly print of an evening half-
penny paper as there could be between your negro and your Esquimau.
The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of
knowledge to the special expert in crime, though I confess that once
when I was very young I confused the _Leeds Mercury_ with the _Western
Morning News_. But a _Times_ leader is entirely distinctive, and these
words could have been taken from nothing else."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
For half an hour I waited with every nerve on the alert, but there
came no other sound save the chiming clock and the rustle of the ivy
on the wall.
    -- Watson, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
Life has become like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green
patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point
the track.
    -- From "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
As far as I could judge, the figure was that of a tall, thin man. He
stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head
bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat
and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit
of that terrible place.
    -- Watson, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
I am certainly developing the wisdom of the serpent, for when Mortimer
pressed his questions to an inconvenient extent I asked him casually
to what type Frankland's skull belonged, and so heard nothing but
craniology for the rest of our drive. I have not lived for years with
Sherlock Holmes for nothing.
    -- Watson, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"It is murder, Watson -- refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
To all the world he was the man of violence, half animal and half
demon; but to her he always remained the little wilful boy of her own
girlhood, the child who had clung to her hand. Evil indeed is the man
who has not one woman to mourn him.
    -- Watson, on the death of Selden
       in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"We have him, Watson, we have him, and I dare swear that before
tomorrow night he will be fluttering in our net as helpless as one of
his own butterflies. A pin, a cork, and a card, and we add him to the
Baker Street collection!" He burst into one of his rare fits of
laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him
laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.
    -- From "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as
mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes
glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap
were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a
disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more
hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke
upon us out of the wall of fog.
    -- From "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could
kill him.
    -- From "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
The more _outr_ and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it
deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to
complicate a case is, when duly considered and scientifically handled,
the one which is most likely to elucidate it.
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
There can be no doubt that Stapleton exercised an influence over her
which may have been love or may have been fear, or very possibly both,
since they are by no means incompatible emotions.
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
"The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what
a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
~
As I did so I struck against an elderly, deformed man, who had been
behind me, and I knocked down several books which he was carrying. I
remember that as I picked them up, I observed the title of one of
them, _The Origin of Tree Worship_, and it struck me that the fellow
must be some poor bibliophile, who, either as a trade or as a hobby,
was a collector of obscure volumes.
    -- Watson, in "The Adventure of the Empty House"
~
"I am not a fanciful person, but I give you my word that I seemed to
hear Moriarty's voice screaming at me out of the abyss."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Empty House"
~
"I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by
visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may
have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named
Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were
receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in
at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at
Khartoum the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign
Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into
the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at
Montpellier, in the south of France."
    -- Sherlock Holmes explains his three-year absence,
       in "The Adventure of the Empty House"
~
"I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite
variety," said he, and I recognized in his voice the joy and pride
which the artist takes in his own creation.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Empty House"
~
  "That you, Lestrade?" said Holmes.
  "Yes, Mr. Holmes. I took the job myself. It's good to see you back
in London, sir."
  "I think you want a little unofficial help. Three undetected murders
in one year won't do, Lestrade. But you handled the Molesey Mystery
with less than your usual -- that's to say, you handled it fairly
well."
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Lestrade,
       in "The Adventure of the Empty House"
~
"My collection of M's is a fine one," said he. "Moriarty himself is
enough to make any letter illustrious, and here is Morgan the
poisoner, and Merridew of abominable memory, and Mathews, who knocked
out my left canine in the waiting-room at Charing Cross, and, finally,
here is our friend of to-night."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Empty House"
~
"There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and
then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it
often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his
development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a
sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which
came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were,
the epitome of the history of his own family."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Empty House"
~
"Meanwhile, come what may, Colonel Moran will trouble us no more. The
famous air-gun of Von Herder will embellish the Scotland Yard Museum,
and once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to
examining those interesting little problems which the complex life of
London so plentifully presents."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Empty House"
~
"With that man in the field, one's morning paper presented infinite
possibilities. Often it was only the smallest trace, Watson, the
faintest indication, and yet it was enough to tell me that the great
malignant brain was there, as the gentlest tremors of the edges of the
web remind one of the foul spider which lurks in the centre. Petty
thefts, wanton assaults, purposeless outrage -- to the man who held
the clue all could be worked into one connected whole. To the
scientific student of the higher criminal world, no capital in Europe
offered the advantages which London then possessed. But now --" He
shrugged his shoulders in humorous deprecation of the state of things
which he had himself done so much to produce.
    -- Sherlock Holmes, on Professor Moriarty,
       in "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder"
~
"You mentioned your name, as if I should recognize it, but I assure
you that, beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a
solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever
about you."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder"
~
"Arrest you!" said Holmes. "This is really most grati-- most interesting."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder"
~
"But he had not that supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when
to stop."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, on Jonas Oldacre,
       in "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder"
~
"These hieroglyphics have evidently a meaning. If it is a purely
arbitrary one, it may be impossible for us to solve it. If, on the
other hand, it is systematic, I have no doubt that we shall get to the
bottom of it."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"
~
"I have no desire to make mysteries, but it is impossible at the
moment of action to enter into long and complex explanations."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"
~
"I am fairly familiar with all forms of secret writings, and am myself
the author of a trifling monograph upon the subject, in which I
analyze one hundred and sixty separate ciphers, but I confess that
this is entirely new to me."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"
~
"As you are aware, E is the most common letter in the English
alphabet, and it predominates to so marked an extent that even in a
short sentence one would expect to find it most often. Out of fifteen
symbols in the first message, four were the same, so it was reasonable
to set this down as E."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"
~
"What one man can invent another can discover."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"
~
"I nearly fell into the error of supposing that you were typewriting.
Of course, it is obvious that it is music. You observe the spatulate
finger-ends, Watson, which is common to both professions? There is a
spirituality about the face, however" -- she gently turned it towards
the light -- "which the typewriter does not generate. This lady is a
musician."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist"
~
  "Well," said I, "you call that love, Mr. Carruthers, but I should
call it selfishness."
  "Maybe the two things go together."
    -- Watson and Bob Carruthers,
       in "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist"
~
In the whirl of our incessant activity, it has often been difficult
for me, as the reader has probably observed, to round off my
narratives, and to give those final details which the curious might
expect. Each case has been the prelude to another, and the crisis once
over, the actors have passed for ever out of our busy lives.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist"
~
His card, which seemed too small to carry the weight of his academic
distinctions, preceded him by a few seconds, and then he entered
himself -- so large, so pompous, and so dignified that he was the very
embodiment of self-possession and solidity. And yet his first action,
when the door had closed behind him, was to stagger against the table,
whence he slipped down upon the floor, and there was that majestic
figure prostrate and insensible upon our bearskin hearth-rug.
    -- The entrance of Thorneycroft Huxtable, M.A., Ph.D., in
       "The Adventure of the Priory School"
~
"Now," said Holmes, when the rejoicing lackey had disappeared, "having
secured the future, we can afford to be more lenient with the past."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Priory School"
~
So unworldly was he -- or so capricious -- that he frequently refused
his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal
to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense
application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented
those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination
and challenged his ingenuity.
    -- Watson's description of Sherlock Holmes,
       in "The Adventure of Black Peter"
~
"There, Watson, this infernal case had haunted me for ten days. I
hereby banish it completely from my presence."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of Black Peter"
~
"There can be no question, my dear Watson, of the value of exercise
before breakfast."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of Black Peter"
~
"If you could have looked into Allardyce's back shop, you would have
seen a dead pig swung from a hook in the ceiling, and a gentleman in
his shirt sleeves furiously stabbing at it with this weapon. I was
that energetic person, and I have satisfied myself that by no exertion
of my strength can I transfix the pig with a single blow. Perhaps you
would care to try?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of Black Peter"
~
  "They appear to be lists of Stock Exchange securities. I thought
that `J.H.N.' were the initials of a broker, and that `C.P.R.' may
have been his client."
  "Try Canadian Pacific Railway," said Holmes.
    -- Hopkins and Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of Black Peter"
~
It was a long and melancholy vigil, and yet brought with it something
of the thrill which the hunter feels when he lies beside the water-
pool, and waits for the coming of the thirsty beast of prey. What
savage creature was it which might steal upon us out of the darkness?
Was it a fierce tiger of crime, which could only be taken fighting
hard with flashing fang and claw, or would it prove to be some
skulking jackal, dangerous only to the weak and unguarded?
    -- From "The Adventure of Black Peter"
~
"Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand
before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding,
venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened
faces? Well, that's how Milverton impresses me."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton"
~
"I am aware that what you say is true about the lady's resources,"
said he. "At the same time you must admit that the occasion of a
lady's marriage is a very suitable time for her friends and relatives
to make some little effort upon her behalf. They may hesitate as to an
acceptable wedding present. Let me assure them that this little bundle
of letters would give more joy than all the candelabra and butter-
dishes in London."
    -- Charles Augustus Milverton,
       in "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton"
~
"You know, Watson, I don't mind confessing to you that I have always
had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. This
is the chance of my lifetime in that direction. See here!" He took a
neat little leather case out of a drawer, and opening it he exhibited
a number of shining instruments. "This is a first-class, up-to-date
burgling kit, with nickel-plated jemmy, diamond-tipped glass-cutter,
adaptable keys, and every modern improvement which the march of
civilization demands."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton"
~
"You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty
family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley
had sunk into the butter upon a hot day."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons"
~
  No. 131 was one of a row, all flat-chested, respectable, and most
unromantic dwellings. As we drove up, we found the railings in front
of the house lined by a curious crowd. Holmes whistled.
  "By George! It's attempted murder at the least. Nothing less will
hold the London message-boy. There's a deed of violence indicated in
that fellow's round shoulders and outstretched neck."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons"
~
In rapid succession we passed through the fringe of fashionable
London, hotel London, theatrical London, literary London, commercial
London, and, finally, maritime London, till we came to a riverside
city of a hundred thousand souls, where the tenement houses swelter
and reek with the outcasts of Europe.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons"
~
"The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know
how to use it."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons"
~
Lestrade and I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous
impulse, we both broke at clapping, as at the well-wrought crisis of a
play. A flush of colour sprang to Holmes's pale cheeks, and he bowed
to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his
audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a
reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and
applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned
away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to
its depths by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons"
~
"Well," said Lestrade, "I've seen you handle a good many cases, Mr.
Holmes, but I don't know that I ever knew a more workmanlike one than
that. We're not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very
proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow, there's not a man, from
the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn't be glad
to shake you by the hand."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons"
~
"By Jove! my dear fellow, it is nearly nine, and the landlady babbled
of green peas at seven-thirty."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Three Students"
~
As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon the repulsive story of
the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker. Here also
I find an account of the Addleton tragedy, and the singular contents
of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession
case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and
arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin -- an exploit which won for
Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the
Order of the Legion of Honour.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez"
~
Outside the wind howled down Baker Street, while the rain beat
fiercely against the windows. It was strange there, in the very depths
of the town, with ten miles of man's handiwork on every side of us, to
feel the iron grip of Nature, and to be conscious that to the huge
elemental forces all London was no more than the molehills that dot
the fields.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez"
~
  "It is indeed, Mr. Holmes. I've had a bustling afternoon, I promise
you. Did you see anything of the Yoxley case in the latest editions?"
  "I've seen nothing later than the fifteenth century to-day."
    -- Stanley Hopkins and Sherlock Holmes,
       in "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez"
~
  Holmes rose. Taking the forms, he carried them over to the window
and carefully examined that which was uppermost.
  "It is a pity he did not write in pencil," said he, throwing them
down again with a shrug of disappointment. "As you have no doubt
frequently observed, Watson, the impression usually goes through -- a
fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter"
~
"He is big enough and old enough to look after himself, and if he is
so foolish as to lose himself, I entirely refuse to accept the
responsibility of hunting for him."
    -- Lord Mount-James, on his nephew,
       in "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter"
~
"Come, Watson," said he, and we passed from that house of grief into
the pale sunlight of the winter day.
    -- Sherlock Holmes's words in the last paragraph
       of "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter"
~
"Come, Watson, come!" he cried. "The game is afoot. Not a word! Into
your clothes and come!"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange"
~
"Perhaps when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my
own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a
simpler one is at hand."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange"
~
"We have not yet met our Waterloo, Watson, but this is our Marengo,
for it begins in defeat and ends in victory."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange"
~
"Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by
my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime. I
have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of
England than with my own conscience."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange"
~
"And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable. You remember the
woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on
her nose -- that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build
on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or
their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a
curling tongs."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Second Stain"
~
  "I am inclined to think--" said I.
  "I should do so," Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.
    -- Opening lines of "The Valley of Fear"
~
  "You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?"
  "The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as--"
  "My blushes, Watson!" Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.
  "I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public."
  "A touch! A distinct touch!" cried Holmes. "You are developing a
certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must
learn to guard myself.
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Watson, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
"But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes
of the law -- and there lie the glory and the wonder of it! The
greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the
controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or
marred the destiny of nations -- that's the man! But so aloof is he
from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his
management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you
have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's
pension as a solatium for his wounded character."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
"Is he not the celebrated author of the Dynamics of an Asteroid, a
book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that
it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of
criticizing it?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, on Professor Moriarty,
       in "The Valley of Fear"
~
  "But what can he do?"
  "Hum! That's a large question. When you have one of the first brains
of Europe up against you, and all the powers of darkness at his back,
there are infinite possibilities."
    -- Watson and Sherlock Holmes, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
  "The next sign is C2. What do you make of that, Watson?"
  "Chapter the second, no doubt."
  "Hardly that, Watson. You will, I am sure, agree with me that if the
page be given, the number of the chapter is immaterial. Also that if
page 534 finds us only in the second chapter, the length of the first
one must have been really intolerable."
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Watson, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
"Let us consider the claims of Whitaker's Almanac. It is in common
use. It has the requisite number of pages. It is in double column.
Though reserved in its earlier vocabulary, it becomes, if I remember
right, quite garrulous towards the end."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
"There, Watson! What do you think of pure reason and its fruit? If the
green-grocer had such a thing as a laurel wreath, I should send Billy
round for it."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly
recognizes genius ...
    -- Watson, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
"Mr. Mac, the most practical thing that you ever did in your life
would be to shut yourself up for three months and read twelve hours a
day at the annals of crime. Everything comes in circles -- even
Professor Moriarty. ... The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes
up. It's all been done before, and will be again."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
  "Well, Holmes," I murmured, "have you found anything out?"
  He stood beside me in silence, his candle in his hand. Then the
tall, lean figure inclined towards me. "I say, Watson," he whispered,
"would you be afraid to sleep in the same room with a lunatic, a man
with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?"
  "Not in the least," I answered in astonishment.
  "Ah, that's lucky," he said, and not another word would he utter
that night.
    -- From "The Valley of Fear"
~
"Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is one of the essentials of our
profession. The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge
are often of extraordinary interest."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
"The blunt accusation, the brutal tap upon the shoulder -- what can
one make of such a denouement? But the quick inference, the subtle
trap, the clever forecast of coming events, the triumphant vindication
of bold theories -- are these not the pride and the justification of
our life's work?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
"A great brain and a huge organization have been turned to the
extinction of one man. It is crushing the nut with the triphammer --
an absurd extravagance of energy -- but the nut is very effectually
crushed all the same."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Valley of Fear"
~
  Barker beat his head with his clenched fist in his impotent anger.
"Do not tell me that we have to sit down under this? Do you say that
no one can ever get level with this king devil?"
  "No, I don't say that," said Holmes, and his eyes seemed to be
looking far into the future. "I don't say that he can't be beat. But
you must give me time -- you must give me time!"
  We all sat in silence for some minutes while those fateful eyes
still strained to pierce the veil.
    -- The final paragraphs of "The Valley of Fear"
~
The friends of Mr. Sherlock Holmes will be glad to learn that he is
still alive and well, though somewhat crippled by occasional attacks
of rheumatism. He has, for many years, lived in a small farm upon the
downs five miles from Eastbourne, where his time is divided between
philosophy and agriculture. During this period of rest he has refused
the most princely offers to take up various cases, having determined
that his retirement was a permanent one.
    -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
       from the preface to the collection _His Last Bow_.
~
"My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it
is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is
commonplace; the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have
passed forever from the criminal world."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge"
~
"I'm bound to say that I make nothing of the note except that there
was something on hand, and that a woman, as usual, was at the bottom
of it."
    -- Inspector Baynes, in "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge"
~
"Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find
yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge"
~
  "Well, well! What next?" said he. "Brother Mycroft is coming round."
  "Why not?" I asked.
  "Why not? It is as if you met a tram-car coming down a country lane.
Mycroft has his rails and he runs on them. His Pall Mall lodgings, the
Diogenes Club, Whitehall -- that is his cycle. Once, and only once, he
has been here. What upheaval can possibly have derailed him?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Watson,
       in "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans"
~
All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.
    -- Sherlock Holmes, on his brother Mycroft,
       in "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans"
~
"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other
contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
truth."
  -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans"
~
A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that
in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled
senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous
and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and
swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of
something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the
threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul.
    -- Watson, in "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot"
~
"I have never loved, Watson, but if I did and if the woman I loved had
met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done.
Who knows?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot"
~
He took down the great book in which, day by day, he filed the agony
columns of the various London journals. "Dear me!" said he, turning
over the pages, "what a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings! What a
rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting-
ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual!"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Red Circle"
~
"Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the
greatest for the last."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Red Circle"
~
"There is one correspondent who is a sure draw, Watson. That is the
bank. Single ladies must live, and their passbooks are compressed
diaries."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax"
~
"Besides, on general principles it is best that I should not leave the
country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an
unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax"
~
To Holmes I wrote showing how rapidly and surely I had got down to the
roots of the matter. In reply I had a telegram asking for a
description of Dr. Shlessinger's left ear.
    -- Watson, in "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax"
~
"And a singularly consistent investigation you have made, my dear
Watson," said he. "I cannot at the moment recall any possible blunder
which you have omitted."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax"
~
"Now we will take another line of reasoning. When you follow two
separate chains of thought, Watson, you will find some point of
intersection which should approximate to the truth."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax"
~
Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering
woman. Not only was her first-floor flat invaded at all hours by
throngs of singular and often undesirable characters but her
remarkable lodger showed an eccentricity and irregularity in his life
which must have sorely tried her patience. His incredible untidiness,
his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver
practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific
experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung
around him made him the very worst tenant in London. On the other
hand, his payments were princely. I have no doubt that the house might
have been purchased at the price which Holmes paid for his rooms
during the years that I was with him.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Dying Detective"
~
She was fond of him, too, for he had a remarkable gentleness and
courtesy in his dealings with women. He disliked and distrusted the
sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent.
    -- Watson, describing Sherlock Holmes,
       in "The Adventure of the Dying Detective"
~
"I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours
electricity into a non-conductor?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Dying Detective"
~
"Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one
solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem. Ah, I am
wandering! Strange how the brain controls the brain! What was I
saying, Watson?"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Dying Detective"
~
"You and I, Watson, we have done our part. Shall the world, then, be
overrun by oysters? No, no; horrible!"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Dying Detective"
~
"My correspondence, however, is, as you know, a varied one, and I am
somewhat upon my guard against any packages which reach me."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Dying Detective"
~
It was nine o'clock at night upon the second of August -- the most
terrible August in the history of the world.
    -- First sentence of "His Last Bow"
~
The secretary chuckled. "She might almost personify Britannia," said
he, "with her complete self-absorption and general air of comfortable
somnolence."
    -- Baron Von Herling, in "His Last Bow"
~
"I may say that a good many of these papers have come through me, and
I need not add are thoroughly untrustworthy. It would brighten my
declining years to see a German cruiser navigating the Solent
according to the mine-field plans which I have furnished."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "His Last Bow"
~
  "But you, Holmes -- you have changed very little -- save for that
horrible goatee."
  "These are the sacrifices one makes for one's country, Watson," said
Holmes, pulling at his little tuft. "To-morrow it will be but a
dreadful memory."
    -- Watson and Holmes, in "His Last Bow"
~
"With my hair cut and a few other superficial changes I shall no doubt
reappear at Claridge's to-morrow as I was before this American stunt
-- I beg your pardon, Watson, my well of English seems to be
permanently defiled -- before this American job came my way."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "His Last Bow"
~
"Here is the fruit of my leisured ease, the magnum opus of my latter
years!" He picked up the volume from the table and read out the whole
title, _Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon
the Segregation of the Queen_. "Alone I did it. Behold the fruit of
pensive nights and laborious days when I watched the little working
gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "His Last Bow"
~
  "Well, you realize your position, you and your accomplice here. If I
were to shout for help as we pass through the village--"
  "My dear sir, if you did anything so foolish you would probably
enlarge the two limited titles of our village inns by giving us 'The
Dangling Prussian' as a signpost."
    -- Von Bork and Holmes, in "His Last Bow"
~
"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.
There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on
England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us
may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less,
and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the
storm has cleared. Start her up, Watson, for it's time that we were on
our way. I have a check for five hundred pounds which should be cashed
early, for the drawer is quite capable of stopping it if he can."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in the final paragraph of "His Last Bow"
~
I fear that Mr. Sherlock Holmes may become like one of those popular
tenors who, having outlived their time, are still tempted to make
repeated farewell bows to their indulgent audiences. This must cease
and he must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary. One likes
to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of
imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of
Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where
Scott's heroes still may strut, Dickens's delightful Cockneys still
raise a laugh, and Thackeray's worldlings continue to carry on their
reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a
Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while
some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill
the stage which they have vacated.
    -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from the preface to the collection
       _The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes_.
~
  "But why not eat?"
  "Because the faculties become refined when you starve them. Why,
surely, as a doctor, my dear Watson, you must admit that what your
digestion gains in the way of blood supply is so much lost to the
brain. I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.
Therefore, it is the brain I must consider."
    -- Watson and Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone"
~
"It is a small point, Count Sylvius, but perhaps you would kindly give
me my prefix when you address me. You can understand that, with my
routine of work, I should find myself on familiar terms with half the
rogues' gallery, and you will agree that exceptions are invidious."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone"
~
"No violence, gentlemen -- no violence, I beg of you! Consider the
furniture!"
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone"
~
Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross,
there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box with my name,
John H. Watson, M. D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid.
    -- From "The Adventure of Thor Bridge"
~
Among these unfinished tales is that of Mr. James Phillimore, who,
stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more
seen in this world. No less remarkable is that of the cutter Alicia,
which sailed one spring morning into a small patch of mist from where
she never again emerged, nor was anything further ever heard of
herself and her crew. A third case worthy of note is that of Isadora
Persano, the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark
staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a
remarkable worm said to be unknown to science.
    -- From "The Adventure of Thor Bridge"
~
  "Well, if dollars make no difference to you, think of the
reputation. If you pull this off every paper in England and America
will be booming you. You'll be the talk of two continents."
  "Thank you, Mr. Gibson, I do not think that I am in need of
booming."
    -- Neil Gibson and Sherlock Holmes,
       in "The Adventure of Thor Bridge"
~
  "You've done yourself no good this morning, Mr. Holmes, for I have
broken stronger men than you. No man ever crossed me and was the
better for it."
  "So many have said so, and yet here I am," said Holmes, smiling.
    -- Neil Gibson and Sherlock Holmes,
       in "The Adventure of Thor Bridge"
~
Come at once if convenient -- if inconvenient come all the same.
    -- A note from Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the
       Creeping Man"
~
The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar. He was a
man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of
them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the
old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable.
    -- Watson, in "The Adventure of the Creeping Man"
~
He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be
said to be made to me -- many of them would have been as appropriately
addressed to his bedstead -- but none the less, having formed the
habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and
interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my
mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like
intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly.
    -- Watson, in "The Adventure of the Creeping Man"
~
"A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy
family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling
dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones. And their passing moods
may reflect the passing moods of others."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Creeping Man"
~
"When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Creeping Man"
~
"Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson," said
Holmes in a reminiscent voice. "It was a ship which is associated with
the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet
prepared."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire"
~
"This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must
remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire"
~
Holmes looked at me thoughtfully and shook his head. "I never get your
limits, Watson," said he. "There are unexplored possibilities about
you."
    -- From "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire"
~
It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one
man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another
man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of
comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.
    -- Opening paragraph of "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs"
~
  "You say he was affable?"
  "A purring cat who thinks he sees prospective mice. Some people's
affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls."
    -- Watson and Holmes, discussing Baron Gruner,
       in "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client"
~
He swung a huge knotted lump of a fist under my friend's nose. Holmes
examined it closely with an air of great interest. "Were you born so?"
he asked. "Or did it come by degrees?" It may have been the icy
coolness of my friend, or it may have been the slight clatter which I
made as I picked up the poker. In any case, our visitor's manner
became less flamboyant.
    -- From "The Adventure of the Three Gables"
~
"But there are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world
without them."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Three Gables"
~
Speaking of my old friend and biographer, I would take this
opportunity to remark that if I burden myself with a companion in my
various little inquiries it is not done out of sentiment or caprice,
but it is that Watson has some remarkable characteristics of his own
to which in his modesty he has given small attention amid his
exaggerated estimates of my own performances. A confederate who
foresees your conclusions and course of action is always dangerous,
but one to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise, and to
whom the future is always a closed book, is indeed an ideal helpmate.
    -- Sherlock Holmes,
       writing in "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier"
~
"I see no more than you, but I have trained myself to notice what I
see."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier"
~
He seemed to live in some high abstract region of surds and conic
sections, with little to connect him with ordinary life.
    -- Sherlock Holmes, describing Ian Murdoch,
       in "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane"
~
  "You certainly do things thoroughly, Mr. Holmes."
  "I should hardly be what I am if I did not."
    -- Inspector Bardle and Sherlock Holmes,
       in "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane"
~
"I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for
trifles."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane"
~
"Exactly, Watson. Pathetic and futile. But is not all life pathetic
and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We
grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse
than a shadow -- misery."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman"
~
"Amberley excelled at chess -- one mark, Watson, of a scheming mind."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman"
~
I deprecate, however, in the strongest way the attempts which have
been made lately to get at and to destroy these papers. The source of
these outrages is known, and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes's
authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician,
the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public.
There is at least one reader who will understand.
    -- Watson, in "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger"
~
  "Your life is not your own," he said. "Keep your hands off it."
  "What use is it to anyone?"
  "How can you tell? The example of patient suffering is in itself the
most precious of all lessons to an impatient world."
    -- Sherlock Holmes and Eugenia Ronder,
       in "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger"
~
"These are deep waters, Mr. Mason; deep and rather dirty."
    -- Sherlock Holmes, in "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place"
~
"You will not, I am sure, be offended if I say that any reputation for
sharpness which I may possess has been entirely gained by the
admirable foil which you have made for me. Have I not heard of
debutantes who have insisted on plainness in their chaperones?"
    -- Holmes, to Watson, in "The Field Bazaar"
~
"My small experience of cricket clubs has taught me that next to
churches and cavalry ensigns they are the most debt-laden things upon
earth."
    -- Holmes, in "The Field Bazaar"
~
There are many who will still bear in mind the singular circumstances
which, under the heading of the Rugby Mystery, filled many columns of
the daily Press in the spring of the year 1892. Coming as it did at a
period of exceptional dulness, it attracted perhaps rather more
attention than it deserved, but it offered to the public that mixture
of the whimsical and the tragic which is most stimulating to the
popular imagination.
    -- From "The Story of the Man with the Watches"
~
"I do not go so far as to say that the English are more honest than
any other nation, but I have found them more expensive to buy."
    -- Herbert de Lernac, in "The Story of the Lost Special"
~
"Our stoker did his business so clumsily that Slater in his struggles
fell off the engine, and though fortune was with us so far that he
broke his neck in the fall, still he remained as a blot upon that
which would otherwise have been one of those complete masterpieces
which are only to be contemplated in silent admiration. The criminal
expert will find in John Slater the one flaw in all our admirable
combinations. A man who has had as many triumphs as I can afford to be
frank, and I therefore lay my finger upon John Slater, and I proclaim
him to be a flaw."
    -- Herbert de Lernac, in "The Story of the Lost Special"
~
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the
memories and the dreams of Time.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The White Ship"
~
In the land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither
suffering nor death.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The White Ship"
~
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"
~
By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not
beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced
by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they
came to use less and less taste in what they concealed.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"
~
Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all
that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not
communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps
them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear
down these houses, for they must often dream.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"
~
Queer haow a *cravin'* gits a holt on ye -- As ye love the Almighty,
young man, don't tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta
make me *hungry fer victuals I couldn't raise nor buy* -- here, set
still, what's ailin' ye? ...
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"
~
These folk say that on a table in a bare room on the ground floor are
many peculiar bottles, in each a small piece of lead suspended
pendulum-wise from a string. And they say that the Terrible Old Man
talks to these bottles, addressing them by such names as Jack, Scar-
Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate Ellis, and that whenever
he speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum within makes certain
definite vibrations as if in answer. Those who have watched the tall,
lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not watch
him again.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Terrible Old Man"
~
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and
sadness.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Outsider"
~
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never
since been able to find the Rue d'Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry;
either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely
written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich
Zann.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Music of Erich Zann"
~
Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West -- Re-Animator"
~
They must known it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose
scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind
the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I
have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in
the walls.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"
~
Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him
monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the
secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"
~
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"
~
Prying curiosity means death.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"
~
The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to
question the past very closely.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Pickman's Model"
~
... another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest -- a
scene in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about
one who held a well-known Boston guide-book and was evidently reading
aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage, and every face seemed
so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I almost
thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was,
"Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn".
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Pickman's Model"
~
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all its contents.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
~
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of
infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
~
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated
knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our
frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the
revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of
a new dark age.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
~
That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an
accidental piecing together of separated things -- in this case an old
newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
~
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial
intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea
of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol
representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could
conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded
simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,
I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy,
tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary
wings, but it was the *general outline* of the whole which made it
most shockingly frightful.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
~
What seemed to be the main document was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in
characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a
word so unheard-of.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
~
When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world
through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.
But although They no longer lived, They would never really die.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
~
That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the
secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His
subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know,
for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and
wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and
all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
~
"That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even
death may die."
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting the _Necronomicon_,
       in "The Call of Cthulhu"
~
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with
darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-
afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst
of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and
two stalwart men by my side.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Cool Air"
~
It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as
such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"
~
No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green
grass and leafage; but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants
of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the
known tints of earth. The Dutchman's breeches became a thing of
sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic
perversion.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"
~
It is better to burrow for Gugs than to bother with the graves of men.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
~
A ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
~
It would be much better to let all gods alone except in tactful
prayers.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
~
One grows accustomed to the anomalies of prying creatures.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
~
The gods so dislike to be known among men that none can be found who
has seen their faces wittingly.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
~
The one foe which Earth's cats fear; the very large and peculiar cats
from Saturn.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
~
Earth's gods may sometimes be surpassed by a wise mortal.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
~
All which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
~
Then too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous
whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the
birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and
that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's
struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves
the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac
laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed
silence.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror"
~
The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in
the spaces we know, but *between* them, They walk serene and primal,
undimensioned and to us unseen.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_ in "The
       Dunwich Horror"
~
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is
the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one
in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and
where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod
earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can
behold Them as They tread.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_
       in "The Dunwich Horror"
~
They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been
spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers
with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.
They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city
behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them,
and what man knows Kadath?
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_
       in "The Dunwich Horror"
~
As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet
ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded
threshold.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_
       in "The Dunwich Horror"
~
Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man
rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait
patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_
       in "The Dunwich Horror"
~
Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special
atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing
like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the
backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such
expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of
Renaissance arcades.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"
~
Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic
entity -- never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in
the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"
~
I learned whence Cthulhu *first* came, and why half the great
temporary stars of history had flared forth. I guess -- from hints
which made even my informant pause timidly -- the secret behind the
Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by
the immemorial allegory of Tao.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"
~
Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather
than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of
stark desolation. The sight of such linked infinities of black,
brooding compartments given over to cobwebs and memories and the
conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even
the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
~
After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of
whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the
monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span
closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and
space -- to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous
vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them,
clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-
filled core, before the utter end.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"
~
If the thing were there -- and if I were not dreaming -- the
implications would be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to
bear. What tormented me most was my momentary inability to feel that
my surroundings were a dream.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"
~
If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all
too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible
shadow out of time.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"
~
  I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof,
and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found.
  If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"
~
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest
and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
~
It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate
knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against
false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a
particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy
to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of
years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to the Providence Evening News,
       September 5 1914
~
The town, brooding quietly in the Sabbath radiance despite the herds
of sightseers unloos'd upon it, does not at first impress one. The
Monument is so distant, the sky so vacant of tall buildings, and the
ground so devoted to parks, malls, and wide spaces, that one cannot
gather the sense of compact and active life which one usually
associates with large cities.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, describing Washington DC, in a letter to
       Mrs F.C. Clark, April 21 1925
~
During this hospital period I had my first experience in lone
housekeeping. Aided by the written instructions of my wife I made
coffee that I could actually drink, and cooked spaghetti that I could
actually eat -- and as a matter of personal pride I kept the house
swept and dusted.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, June 15 1925
~
Reaching the farmhouse by motor from the station, we found it quite
tolerable though somewhat lonely; and to my mind vastly enhanced by
the lively presence of a large family of irresistible gray kittens.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, June 15 1925
~
I like a tale to be told as directly and impersonally as possible,
from an angle of utter and absolute detachment.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long,
       August 2 1925
~
It so happens that I am unable to take pleasure or interest in
anything but a mental re-creation of other & better days ... so in
order to avoid the madness which leads to violence & suicide I must
cling to the few shreds of old days & old ways which are left to me.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to an unknown correspondent,
       August 8 1925
~
Yes -- such sensitivenesses of temperament are very inconvenient when
one has no money -- but it's easier to criticise than to cure them.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to an unknown correspondent,
       August 8 1925
~
As I have always said, missionaries are infernal nuisances who ought
to be kept at home -- dull, solemn asses without scientific acumen or
historical perspective ...
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mrs F.C. Clark, September
       12-13 1925
~
When my stuff is done it always disappoints me -- never quite
presenting the fulness of the picture I have in mind -- but since a
crude fixation of the image is better than nothing, I plug along & do
the feeble best I can.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith,
       September 20 1925
~
Peste! Sacrebleu! Nom d'un Cochon vert! O Saint Dieu et Notre Dame de
Montreal! THIS GAWD-DAMN COLD!!!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 1925
~
Ineffective & injudicious I may be, but I trust I may never be
inartistic or ill-bred in my course of conduct.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to an unknown correspondent,
       December 22-23 1925
~
Possess, O Flambeau of Patersonic Tenebrosity, a cardiac organ; and
heap upon my valueless cranium the carbonaceous symbols of Eblis'
aeternal conflagrations!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, January 5 1926
~
Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to
take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and
pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of
significance in life which gives to human events their apparent
motivation and semblance of interest.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Walter J. Coates, March 30 1926
~
Yrs. for ghouls, afreets, and undertakers--
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, sign-off from a letter to Wilfred Blanch
       Talman, April 23 1926
~
As to Long's notion that your work systematically contains phallic
symbolism -- he picked that up at second-hand from Loveman, who seems
to have done enough delving in that line to see phalli in most things
from church steeples to mushrooms.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, May 14 1926
~
It's a pretty old world, after all, & we shall never learn much about
the inner nature of things...
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, May 14 1926
~
You poets can't age -- split me, Sir, if Samuelus isn't a flaming
youth still from all his barren pole and uncertain equator!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, June 1926
~
As to what is meant by "weird" -- and of course weirdness is by no
means confined to horror -- I should say that the real criterion is *a
strong impression of the suspension of natural laws or the presence of
unseen worlds or forces close at hand*.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman,
       August 24 1926
~
Besides the aesthetic, you have managed to work in the practical --
which is always a sealed mystery to me.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman,
       September 8 1926
~
I imagine that Wandrei must be rather a young chap -- though possessed
of a fund of imagery & command of language which will serve him well
when he has laernt the lessons of restraint & austerity of form form
which come with later life.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith,
       October 12 1926
~
I can't get interested in it -- it doesn't even bore me enough to take
my mind off other boredoms.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long,
       October 26 1926
~
This primary attention to plot is probably a wise choice on your part,
because to the weird writer plot is so much more difficult to achieve
than atmosphere.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman,
       October 31 1926
~
But in the end, atmosphere repays cultivation; because it is the final
criterion of convincingness or unconvincingness in any tale whose
major appeal is to the imagination.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman,
       October 31 1926
~
And to think I read them ----- ----- proofs *five* ----- ----- times!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 17 1926
~
As to eyeshades and reversed caps -- you can't convince me that either
or both is or are (a) worth getting indignant or critical about, or
(b) any more foolish than dozens of other accepted customs.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 17 1926
~
Everything in the world outside primitive needs is the chance result
of inessential causes and random associations, and there's no real or
solid criterion by which one can condemn any particular manifestation
of human restlessness.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 17 1926
~
In the more southerly portions the very earth sparkles with some
shining powder that the fanciful would call star dust -- but which I,
as a veteran mineralogist, know must come from the oxydising up of the
neighbouring rocks -- which have mica or something. Being exceedingly
charitable where expense is not involved, I herewith enclose a very
modest specimen as a nucleus of the Theobald Collection of American
Rocks, for which I shall expect a special wing to be built at the
museum.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 26 1926
~
All we may say is, that the more purely an aesthete a man is, the more
likely he is to prefer cats; since the superior grace, beauty, manners
and neatness of the cat cannot but conquer the fancy of any impartial
observer emancipated from mundane and ethical illusions.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, December 1926
~
We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don't give a
damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They're confounded
pretty, and that's all we know and all we need to know!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, December 1926
~
You can get a fairly good bird's-eye view of literary modernism by
reading Ben Hecht's _Erik Dorn_ for prose, and T.S. Eliot's _The Waste
Land_ for what purports to be verse.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to August Derleth, January 2 1927
~
About Oscar Wilde -- it seems to me that he forms a prominent point in
the history of literature without having been supremely great himself.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to August Derleth, January 20 1927
~
No -- New York is dead, & the brilliancy which so impresses one from
outside is the phosphoresence of a maggoty corpse.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Donald Wandrei, February 10 1927
~
Sterling was a real point, & the fact of his not fitting the age is
purely the age's fault.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith,
       February 18 1927
~
By this time I see pretty well what I'm driving at and how I'm doing
it -- that I'm a rather one-sided person whose only really burning
interests are *the past* and *the unknown* or *the strange*, and whose
aestheticism in general is more negative than positive -- i.e., a
hatred of ugliness rather than an active love of beauty.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, March 3 1927
~
I abhor broad prosaic highways with their implications of change,
modernity, and decadence, and make for the calm, untainted inner
countryside whenever I possibly can.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, March 3 1927
~
I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly
sentient thing -- a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out
of those within it and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible
and immaterial psychic growth.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, March 26 1927
~
It is the frank & cynical recognition of the inevitable limitations of
people in general which makes me absolutely indifferent instead of
actively hostile toward mankind.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Donald Wandrei, March 27 1927
~
If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire
of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the
refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, April 1 1927
~
The vistas I relish most are those in which the sunset plays a
transfiguring & glorifying part.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Donald Wandrei, April 21 1927
~
Living things -- usually insane or idiotic members of the family --
concealed in the garrets or secret rooms of old houses are or at least
have been literal realities in rural New England -- I was told by
someone of how he stopped at a lone farmhouse on some errand years
ago, and was nearly frightened out of his wits by the opening of a
sliding panel in the kitchen wall, and the appearance of the most
horrible, dirt-caked, and matted-bearded face he had ever conceived
possible to exist!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, June 1927
~
Mere grotesqueness is very common; sly, malign madness sometimes lurks
around the corner; and berserk, revolting murder under peculiarly
messy and clumsy conditions is a matter of not infrequent record.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, June 1927
~
All the common, unadorned things have been thought and said and
repeated a thousand times before. The dull, prosaic world of usual
feelings and events is so well "written up" that nothing vital remains
to be added.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, June 5 1927
~
And one may add, that the birth of a dear little chee-ild would *not*
solve all problems in glib nickleodeon fashion! Rather, it would be a
complication provocative of even more misery.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, June 12 1927
~
Chambers is like Rupert Hughes & a few other fallen Titans -- equipped
with the right brains & education, but wholly out of the habit of
using them.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, June 24 1927
~
Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common
human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance
in the vast cosmos-at-large.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Fransworth Wright, July 5 1927
~
Wandrei can tell you all there is to be told about the art of hitch-
hiking, whereby the expense of railway fare becomes as obsolete &
quaint a memory as the era of good taste in literature!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, July 15 1927
~
There are *twenty-eight* varieties this season, and we *sampled them
all* within the course of an hour.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, about ice cream, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe,
       July 30 1927
~
And now, at thirty-seven, I am gradually headed for pure
antiquarianism and architecture, and away from literature altogether!
Heaven knows where I'll end up -- but it's a safe bet that I'll never
be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, August 28 1927
~
Well, the orgy is over at last, and the Old Gentlemen is weakly
gasping amidst the prodigious welter of work which piled up during his
absence. Shall I ever see daylight again? Only Mana-Yood-Sushai can
tell! I burrow -- I wallow -- and still there press spectrally upon me
the sinister shadows of imperative agenda. Where did I mislay that
cyanide? No matter, a revolver will do. But first I must get those
Bullen proofs out of the way!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long,
       September 6 1927
~
Of course, so far as personal taste goes, I'm no lover of humanity. To
me cats are in every way more graceful and worthy of respect -- but I
don't try to raise my personal bias to the spurious dignity of a
dogmatic generality...
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long,
       September 6 1927
~
That is the perennial grief of an architectural antiquarian -- in a
city as large as Providence or Boston something quaint is always being
demolished in the interest of alleged progress...
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed,
       September 22 1927
~
As for your new novelette -- look here, young man, you'd better be
mighty careful how you treat your aged and dignified Grandpa as here!
You mustn't make me doing anything cheerful or wholesome, and remember
that only the direst of damnations can befit so inveterate a daemon of
the cosmick abysses.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long,
       September 24 1727
~
I haven't very much energy or perseverance -- the uselessness of
everything, including even aesthetic effort, overshadows my
consciousness & coperates with my native indolence in defeating all
progressive or constructive developments.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 1 1927
~
As to futility & work -- I have come to the comfortably elderly
condition of not caring a rap whether I do anything or not!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith,
       October 15 1927
~
I didn't want the mediaeval stuff, but the book was too good to tear
in half.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, on the purchase of Goodyear's _Roman and
       Mediaeval Art_, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, November 1927
~
Sir, I refuse to fall into your adroit trap! I simply say -- with a
delicate wave of a perfectly manicured and correctly gloved hand --
that you are wrong and I am right. Why? Because I say so! And that is
all a gentleman can add to the matter!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 13 1927
~
In a way, crosswords do harm by cluttering up the mind with an aimless
heap of unusual words selected purely for mechanical exigencies and
having no well-proportioned relation to the needs of graceful
discourse.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 17 1927
~
After walking for some distance, I encounter'd the rusty tracks of a
street-railway, & the worm-eaten poles which still held the limp &
sagging trolley wire. Following this line, I soon came upon a yellow,
vestibuled car numbered 1852 -- of a plain, double-trucked type common
from 1900 to 1910. It was untenanted, but evidently ready to start;
the trolley being on the wire & the air-brake pump now & then
throbbing beneath the floor. I boarded it & looked vainly about for
the light switch -- noting as I did so the absence of controller
handle which implied the brief absence of the motorman. Then I sat
down in one of the cross seats toward the middle, awaiting the arrival
of the crew & the starting of the vehicle. Presently I heard a
swishing in the sparse grass toward the left, & saw the dark forms of
two men looming up in the moonlight. They had the regulation caps of a
railway company, & I could not doubt but that they were the conductor
& motorman. Then one of them *sniffed* with singular sharpness, &
raised his face to howl to the moon. The other dropped on all fours to
run toward the car. I leaped up at once & raced madly out of that car
& away across endless leagues of plateau till exhaustion waked me --
doing this not because the conductor had dropped on all fours, but
because the face of the motorman was a mere white cone tapeding to one
blood-red tentacle. ...
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Donald Wandrei, November 24
       1927, recounting a dream of the night before
~
In furnishing my Irish colleague with an account of my vivid and
active career I did not think it necessary to mention trifles so tame
as Satanism and neogonophagy -- nay, nor my voyage up the Oxus, nor my
visit to Samarcand, nor how *and why* I slew the yellow-veiled priest
at Lhasa -- that priest whose yellow silken veil stood out *too far*
in front of where his face ought to be, and moved in a manner that *I
did not like*.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, December 1927
~
The Magnum Innominandum does not forget.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, December 1927
~
As for affectation -- I'm not fond of any kind, but hate literary
affectation the worst, because it is more permanent and subversive in
its essence. We can get rid of our personal affectations when we begin
to see their absurdity, but our literary affectations are embalmed in
cold print, and have perhaps ruined or at least vitiated what might
have been our best work.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to August Derleth,
       early December 1927
~
This especial old bird, according to an anecdote recorded by George
Sterling, parted from Bierce under the dramatic circumstances of
having a can broken over his head! When I saw his fiction I wondered
why Ambrosius didn't use a crowbar.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, describing Adolphus de Castro in a letter
       to Farnsworth Wright, December 22 1927
~
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman,
       December 28 1927
~
Yes -- nocturnal *howling* has an element of fearfulness for me. I
always associate it with lean, dog-faced beings that walk sometimes on
two legs and sometimes on four, and that lope abroad in the night's
small hours.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer,
       January 1928
~
As for the matter of drinking -- I have never tasted intoxicating
liquor, and never intend to; having a strong aesthetic disgust at
anything which blunts or coarsens the delicate natural equipoise of
the evolved human intellect and imagination.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed,
       February 13 1928
~
I think drink is ugly, and therefore I have nothing to do with it.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, February
       13 1928
~
Have you read _The Castle of Otranto_ itself? If not, *don't*! Let the
summary in Railo continue to give you a "kick", for the original
certainly won't!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer,
       February 14 1928
~
Coleridge represented a fine balance betwixt mind and fancy, and I
like him all the better for not having an excess of sloppy emotion.
The fact that his experience came through books rather than life does
not militate against him, because he had the rare faculty of accepting
the contents of books in an abstract way, as if the material came
directly from life with literary filtration. Bookishness becomes tepid
and artificial only when one looks *at* the books instead of *through*
them. So long as they are utilized only as telescopes, and not
worshipped for their mechanical selves, they form very acceptable
substitutes for vital experience.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, April 1928
~
Ingenuous Age once more essays to find / A proper Gift for Youth's
sophistick Mind, / Well tho' he know how bootless 'tis to send / Aught
that his own old Head can comprehend.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, accompanying a volume of Proust sent as a
       gift to Frank Belknap Long for Christmas 1928
~
Of Wit and Beauty keeps discreetly chary, / And forfeits Sense to be
contemporary.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, accompanying a volume of Proust sent as a
       gift to Frank Belknap Long for Christmas 1928
~
Devoid of Pomp as *Woolworth's* or *McCrory's*, / And cerebral as
*Vogue* or *Snappy-Stories*.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, accompanying a volume of Proust sent as a
       gift to Frank Belknap Long for Christmas 1928
~
What a man *does for pay* is of little significance. What he *is*, as
a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is
everything!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 1929
~
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me.
What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 1929
~
Here are we -- and yonder yawns the universe.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long,
       February 20 1929
~
Speaking of boredom -- why don't you try to accumulate a library which
will furnish you with a solid reserve of intellectual and aesthetic
pabulum? The expense -- unless you are particular about the appearance
of the books -- is truly next to nothing; for one can obtain
astonishing bargains on the 10-cent and 25-cent counters of second-
hand book shops.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to
       March 1 1929
~
I couldn't live a week without a private library -- indeed, I'd part
with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let
go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to
       March 1 1929
~
But the important thing to consider is the prodigious vitality of the
Roman idea. Rome was so mighty that it *could not fall*. It had to
vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity,
and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully
aware that it had vanished from the earth!
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to
       March 1 1929
~
I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject
is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to
make him really know what he's talking about.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to
       March 1 1929
~
I can dream a whole cycle of colonial life from merely gazing on a
tattered old book or almanack with the long 'f'.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to
       March 1 1929
~
It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture -- drugged and frenzied with
the hasheesh of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly
a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and
steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of
philosophy.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to
       March 1 1929
~
All of my 38 1/2 years show in me, I guess; and so far as my
temperament is concerned, I was born an old man.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to
       March 1 1929
~
However -- I am not quite such a solemn prig as you probably assume
from my letters.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to
       March 1 1929
~
My fiction can't be compared with Poe's or Machen's, but I take no
less pleasure in writing it on that account.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929
~
The masters of art are not to 'bow down before', but to enjoy
rationally & with a proper appreciation.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929
~
Language, vocabulary, ideas, imagery -- everything succumbed to my one
intense purpose of thinking & dreaming myself back into that world of
periwigs & long s's which for some odd reason seemed to me the normal
world.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929
~
Even when I break away, it is generally only through imitating
something else! There are my "Poe" pieces & my "Dunsany" pieces -- but
alas -- where are my *Lovecraft* pieces?
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929
~
One thing I'll say for labour; & that is, that it isn't as offensive
as the corresponding mutatory force which now threatens culture in
America. I refer to the force of *business* as a dominating motive in
life, & a persistent absorber of the strongest creative energies of
the American people.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, June 10 1929
~
Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong
religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark
morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
    -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Robert E. Howard, October 4 1930
~
Questions are a burden to others; answers are a prison for oneself.

        -- Sign in the Labour Exchange in "Arrival"
~
Despite materialist efforts, he has survived intact and secure.
All that remains is recognition of a Man.

        -- The President's speech in "Fallout"
~
- For official purposes, everyone has a number.  Yours is Number Six.
- I am not a number; I am a person.

        -- Number Two and Number Six in "Arrival"
~
A still tongue makes a happy life.

        -- Sign in the Labour Exchange in "Arrival"
~
We are honoured to have with us a revolutionary of a different calibre.
He has revolted.  Resisted.  Fought.  Held fast.  Maintained.
Destroyed resistance.  Overcome coercion.

        -- The President's speech in "Fallout"
~
He has gloriously vindicated the right of the individual to be an
individual and this assembly rises to you, Sir.

        -- The President's speech in "Fallout"
~
- I suppose you wonder what you're doing here.
- It had crossed my mind.

        -- Number Two and Number Six in "Arrival"
~
Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment
and will die here like rotten cabbages.

        -- Number Six's speech from "Free for All
~
We desire that these proceedings be conducted in a civilized manner, but
remind ourselves that humanity is not humanized without force.

        -- The President's speech in "Fallout"
~
``I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed,
or numbered! My life is my own.''

        --No.6; Arrival
~
``A still tongue makes a happy life.''

        --From a sign in the Labour Exchange; Arrival.
~
``Questions are a burden to other, answers a prison for oneself.''

        --From a sign in the Labour Exchange; Arrival.
~
No.2:  ``[The Village] even has its own newspaper.''
No.6:  ``You must send me a copy.''

        --Arrival
~
New No.2:  ``Good day, Number Six.''
No.6:  ``Number what?''
New No.2:  ``Six.  For official purposes. Everyone has a number.
Yours is number 6.''
No.6:  ``I am not a number; I am a person.''

        --Arrival
~
``We're all pawns, m'dear.''

        --The Ex-admiral; Arrival
~
No.2:  ``What you should do is find yourself a nice young lady
for the carnival.  You're too independent.  Now, they're pretty
and unattached... ''
No.6:  ``What about her?'' [points to The Observer]
No.2:  ``Quite unsuitable.''
No.6:  ``I'm independent, don't forget.''

        --Dance of the Dead
~
The Observer:  ``[The Village] has been going a long time.''
No.6:  ``Since the war?  Before the war? WHICH war??''
The Observer:  ``A long time!''

        --Dance of the Dead
~
``Never trust a female; even the four-legged variety.''

        --No.6; Dance of the Dead
~
No.2:  ``Are you going to run?''
No.6:  ``Like the blazes; first chance I get.''
No.2:  ``I mean, run for office?''

        --Free For All
~
``Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of
your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.''

        --No.6; Free For All
~
Assistant:  ``He doesn't even bend a little.''
No.2:  ``That's why he'll break!  It only needs one small thing.
If he will answer one simple question, the rest will follow.
Why did he resign?''

        --concerning No.6, Chimes of Big Ben
~
No.6: ``I plan to escape and come back.''
No.2: ``Escape and come back...?''
No.6: ``That's right--escape, come back, wipe this place off the
face of the earth, obliterate it...and you with it.''

        --inside the Green Dome; Chimes of Big Ben
~
No.2:  ``Does not take sugar.  Afraid of putting on a little weight,
are we, Number Six?''
No.6:  ``No, nor the fear of being reduced.''

        --inside the Green Dome; Chimes of Big Ben
~
No.2:  ``I mean, look.  Here!  Tops in his class in woodworking!
That's the stuff we're looking for!  I mean, come on, join in!''
No.6:  ``I'll make you a handle for this door.''

        --inside the Green Dome; Chimes of Big Ben
~
No.6:  ``The whole earth as `The Village'?''
No.2:  ``Yes, that is my hope.  What's yours?''
No.6:  ``I'd like to be the first man on the moon!''

        --Chimes of Big Ben
~
A Judge: ``We're not quite sure what it means.''
No.6:  ``It means what it is.''

        --at the art exhibition, Chimes of Big Ben
~
Psychiatrist [aside to No.2 about No.6]:  ``Interesting subject.
I'd like to know his breaking point!''
No.6:  ``Well, perhaps you'd like to make that your `life's ambition'.''

        --Checkmate
~
No.8:  ``I want to be near you.''
No.6:  ``And everybody's near in this place... far too near.''

        --Checkmate
~
No.6:  ``What are we all looking for?''
Professor's Wife:  ``Well, let's see.  That gentleman over there.
What do you think he's doing?''
No.6:  ``Tearing up a book.''
Professor's Wife:  ``He's creating a fresh concept.
Construction arises from the ashes of destruction.  And that woman?''
No.6:  ``Standing on top of her head.''
Professor's Wife:  ``She's developing a new perspective.''

        --The General
~
No.6:  ``What do you think of this?''
[No.6 hands the Wife a portrait of herself as a general]
Professor's Wife:  ``Not altogether flattering.
So art's your subject too?''
No.6:  ``No, no... Military history... Generals and that sort of thing.''
Professor's Wife:  ``I'm afraid you may be wasting your time.''
No.6:  ``What a pity... I understood your husband was quite
an authority on the subject.''
Professor's Wife:  ``He may be...''
[rips the portrait in two]
Professor's Wife:  ``...but I'm not.''
No.6:  ``Oh...`Creation out of destruction'?''

        --The General
~
Professor's Wife:  ``What does he want?''
No.2:  ``What some of us want ultimately.  To escape.''
Professor's Wife:  ``He persists about the General.''
No.2:  ``I shouldn't worry too much, my dear.
I have an obsession about him myself.''

        --concerning No.6, The General
~
No.2 and No.14 instinctively twist their heads
to the same laboratory door that No.6 opens in his own dream.

        --A.B. and C. (Not a quote, but ``We like it.'')
~
``By the time we've finished with him, he won't know whether
he's Number Six or the cube root of infinity!''

        --No.2; The Schizoid Man
~
``I know every nut and bolt and cog--I built it with my own hands!''

        --No.6, concerning his car; Many Happy Returns
~
No.6:  ``I also have a problem...
I'm not sure which side runs this Village.''
James:  ``A mutual problem.''
No.6:  ``Which I'm going to solve.''
James:  ``Quite.''
No.6:  ``If not here...then elsewhere.''

        --Many Happy Returns
~
``He's an old, old friend....who never gives up.''

        --James [concerning no.6]; Many Happy Returns
~
No.8:  ``Interesting...that he can separate fact from fantasy so quickly.''
No.2:  ``I told you he was different!  I knew it wouldn't work!  Feed
him hallu cinatory drugs.  Put him in a hostile environment!  Talk to him
through microphones!''
No.8:  ``It's always worked and it would have worked this time...''
No.2:  ``But it didn't, did it?  `Give him love...then take it away!
Make him KILL...then face him with DEATH!  He'll CRACK!
Break him, even in his mind, and the rest will be easy!' ''
No.8:  ``It would've worked, if you had kept your head!''

        --Living in Harmony
~
``I see.  The fact that you... `won't explain'...explains everything.''

        --the `retiring' No.2; It's Your Funeral
~
No.6: ``The medallion is hollowed out, it is packed with explosives...''
No.2: ``And before I can hand it over to my successor?''
No.6: ``It will be detonated by radio!''
No.2 (pausing): ``I can think of better ways to die...''
No.6: ``And better causes to die FOR.''

        --It's Your Funeral
~
No.2:  ``I assure you, no matter what significance you may hold for me,
to the Village and its Committee, you are merely Citizen Number Six,
who has to be tolerated, and if necessary, shaped to fit.''
No.6:  ``Public Enemy Number Six.''

        --A Change of Mind
~
``To borrow one of Number Two's sayings: `The butcher with
the sharpest knife... has the warmest heart.' ''

        --No.6; A Change of Mind
~
``You still have a choice; you can still salvage your rights,
the rights to truth and free thought!  Reject this false world
of Number Two... reject it NOW!!''

        --No.6; A Change of Mind
~
``He told those kids a... a blessed fairy tale.
That one wouldn't drop his guard with his own GRANDMOTHER!''

        --No.2 [concerning No.6]; The Girl Who Was Death
~
No.2:  ``You missed, boy.  You still can't [kill]!''
No.6:  ``Sorry, sorry... ''
No.2:  ``Sorry!?  You're sorry for everybody.  Is that why you resigned??''

        --Once Upon a Time
~
``I feel a new man!''

        --No.2, Fall Out
~
``He has revolted.  Resisted.  Fought.  Held fast.
Maintained.  Destroyed resistence.  Overcome coercion.
The right to be person, someone or individual.''
We applaud his private war, and concede that despite materialistic
efforts, he has survived intact and secure!''

        --The President, Fall Out
~
``All that remains is... recognition of a man.''

        --The President [concerning No.6], Fall Out
~
