Home > Work > Too Many Cooks (Nero Wolfe, #5)
1 " Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life "
― Rex Stout , Too Many Cooks (Nero Wolfe, #5)
2 " What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to. "
3 " Enforced courtesy is worse than none. "
4 " Of course, a hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating. "
5 " Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences. "
6 " He threw up his hands and waved them around, and shook all over, and laughed as if he never expected to hear a joke again and would use it all up on this one. "
7 " I wouldn’t use physical violence even if I could, because one of my romantic ideas is that physical violence is beneath the dignity of a man, and that whatever you get by physical aggression costs more than it is worth. "
8 " Can Mr. Wolfe help it if an attractive young fellow insists on coming to cry on his shoulder? "
9 " A pig whose diet is fifty to seventy percent peanuts grows a ham of incredibly sweet and delicate succulence which, well-cured, well-kept and well-cooked, will take precedence over any other ham the world affords. "
10 " [T]he human equipment includes, for instance, a capacity for personal affection and a willingness to strangle selfish and predatory impulse with the rope of social decency. "
11 " The agreements of human society embrace not only protection against murder, but thousands of other things, and it is certainly true that in America—not to mention other continents—the whites have excluded the blacks from some of the benefits of those agreements. It is said that the exclusion has sometimes even extended to murder—that in parts of this country a white man may kill a black one, if not with impunity, at least with a good chance of escaping the penalty which the agreement imposes. That’s bad. It’s deplorable, and I don’t blame black men for resenting it. But you are confronted with a fact, not a theory, and how do you propose to change it? "
12 " These smokes can take it, they’re used to it. "
13 " Indeed.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. “Have you eaten terrapin stewed with butter and chicken broth and sherry? "
14 " Few of us have enough wisdom for justice, or enough leisure for humanity. "
15 " Courtesy is one’s own affair, but decency is a debt to life. "
16 " Telephone calls were to be handled by me, since he knew nothing that I didn’t know. (This jarred my aplomb, since it was the first time he had ever admitted it.) "
17 " You might have thought we were bound for the stratosphere to shine up the moon and pick wild stars. "
18 " The ideal human agreement is one in which distinctions of race and color and religion are totally disregarded; "