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1 " Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty. "
― John Lennon
2 " Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Great Gatsby
3 " Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? May not human life on this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man... "
― Richard Wright , The Outsider
4 " He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood. "
― Samuel Johnson ,
5 " These three man," Mimi said, " are suspects in a recent theft. Last night, Polly Partial received a shipment of twenty blueberry pies. This morning she counted them and came up short." " How many are missing?" I asked." Last night she had twenty," Harvey said, shutting the station door, " and today she found zero. So at least eighteen are missing." " At least." I agreed. "
6 " He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself, for he brings such a power into being either by design or by force, and both of these elements are suspects to the one whom he has made powerful. "
― Niccolò Machiavelli , The Prince
7 " [Richard Bedford Bennett] was the richest Prime Minister and the only millionaire to hold office before Pierre Trudeau. His money obviously colored his thinking -- colored it true blue -- but he did not consider it a political drawback. No leader, he said, could serve the public properly if he was constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadow of debts. This theory is now widely accepted in the United States where it has become practically impossible for a non-millionaire to run for high office without selling pieces of himself like a prize-fighter. Yet the public still suspects a self-made millionaire like Lyndon Johnson while revering the much-richer John F. Kennedy, who got it all from his father. "
8 " The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a tactful publican, it has as few opinions as possible. Many liberals suspect passionate convictions are latently authoritarian. But liberalism should surely be a passionate conviction. Liberals are not necessarily lukewarm. Only the more macho leftist suspects that they have no balls. You can be ardently neutral, and fiercely indifferent. "
― Terry Eagleton
9 " Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it. "
― Czesław Miłosz
10 " While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness. "
― Anna Quindlen , How Reading Changed My Life
11 " In the end I believe the essential spirit that animates those places animates me. If that spirit is God, then I found God...If that spirit is life, then I found life...If that spirit is awe, then I found awe. Part of me suspects it's all three...all I had to do to discover that spirit and the resulting feeling of humility and appreciation was not to look or listen or taste or feel. All I had to do was remember, for what I was looking for I somehow already knew. "
― Bruce Feiler
12 " I had chosen to play the detective—and if there is one thing that unites all the detectives I've ever read about, it's their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks the necessary questions but he doesn't actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn't trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It's a relationship based entirely on deception and it's one that, ultimately, goes nowhere. Once the killer has been identified, the detective leaves and is never seen again. In fact, everyone is glad to see the back of him. "
― Anthony Horowitz , Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland, #1)
13 " It’s all very well to have your eight suspects parading in their endless ring-around-the-rosebush outside the library. That’s fine. But give some sensible reason why they were there. If you must shower the room with bus tickets, provide a reason for that too. In other words, construct your story. Your present problem is not to explain the villainy of the guilty: it’s to explain the stupidity of the innocent. "
― John Dickson Carr , The Door To Doom And Other Detections
14 " Oh please tell me we're not doing the Poirot thing again — the suspects in the library with the candlestick or whatever'.Max looked at him [DCI Cotton]. 'Fruitcake in this case. And what would you prefer? A car chase? It’s the most efficient way to flush out a killer, as Dame Agatha Christie well knew. "
― G.M. Malliet , A Demon Summer (Max Tudor #4)
15 " every thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently changing line is already suspect, no matter in which field of human activity it occurs. Simply because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspects by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior, for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change one's mind. "
― Hannah Arendt , The Origins of Totalitarianism
16 " A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away. "
― Nathaniel Hawthorne , The Blithedale Romance
17 " A goodtrap, like a good story, has to arise naturally from the environment.It has to be seamless. If the prey suspects what’s coming,they’ll bolt. "
― E.J. Patten , Return to Exile (The Hunter Chronicles #1)
18 " Law of Suspects. Suspects are those: who have in any way aided tyranny (royal tyranny, Brissotin tyranny...); who cannot show that they have performed their civic duties; who do not starve, and yet have no visible means of support; who have been refused certificates of citizenship by their Sections; who have been removed from public office by the Convention or its representatives; who belong to an aristocratic family, and have not given proof of constant and extraordinary revolutionary fervor; or who have emigrated. "
― Hilary Mantel , A Place of Greater Safety
19 " Man has less than he suspects of: Time, Friends, Hopes, Qualities.Proverb "
― Idries Shah , Caravan of Dreams
20 " The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies "
― , In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution
