| Quote | Author | Source | Email Quote |
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| "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." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Final Problem |  |
| "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." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Adventure of the Copper Beeches | |
| "Crime is common. Logic is rare." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | 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." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Adventure of the Copper Beeches | |
| "Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Boscombe Valley Mystery | |
| "Ah, me! it's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | 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." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Adventure of the Speckled Band | |
| "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipt them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherish'd by our virtues." | William Shakespeare | All's Well That Ends Well | |
| "I now swear, and record the oath on this page, That I nevermore will discuss this mystery with any human creature until I hold the clue to it in my hand. That I never will relax in my secrecy or in my search. That I will fasten the crime of the murder of my dear dead boy upon the murderer. And, That I devote myself to his destruction." | Charles Dickens | The Mystery of Edwin Drood | |
| "You may bribe a soldier to slay a man with his sword, or a witness to take life by false accusation; but you cannot make a hound tear his benefactor." | Sir Walter Scott | The Talisman | |
Time is a very bankrupt, and owes more than he's worth to season.
Nay, he's a thief too: have you not heard men say
That Time comes stealing on by night and day? | William Shakespeare | The Comedy of Errors | |
| "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic." | G. K. Chesterton | The Innocence of Father Brown (The Blue Cross) | |
| "I suppose that I am commuting a felony. but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle | |
| "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." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle | |
| . . . the crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind. | E. M. Forster | Howards End | |
| We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily, for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating if not excusing its crimes. | James Fenimore Cooper | The Deerslayer | |
| "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." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Adventure of Abbey Grange | |
| As for the law--it catered for a human nature of which it took a naturally low view. | John Galsworthy | The Forsyte Saga | |
| "We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones." | Jules Verne | 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea | |
| "Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed." | William Shakespeare | Othello | |
