“Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.”

“Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.”

“There are two kinds of statistics the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”

“A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find”

“Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.”

“It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous ”

“A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about ”

“The only difference between me and most people is that I'm perfectly aware that all my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already ”

“I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of the human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it.”

“Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious effort to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try." -- Nero Wolf in Death of a Dude.”

“Well." Wolfe was judicious. "You were not under oath. The police have been lied to informally many times by many people, including me. The right to lie in the service of your own interests is highly valued and frequently exercised.”

“No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.”