Solving Crime Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Solving Crime. Here they are! All 100 of them:

So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me. And the accident, the suicide, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you to a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I jsut assist in your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know wheter to feel angry at myself for letting go. But we knew what could be found out, and in finding out, she had made us closer- the Colonel adn Takumi and me, anyway. And that was it. She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.
Richard Rohr (Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life)
I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.
Howard Zinn (You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times)
There should be multiple yous," Grayson says, outlined by the moonlight, a blue phantasm. "So you can help solve all of our problems. So you can help solve the world's problems.
Lee Matthew Goldberg (The Ancestor)
You really should take up boxing, or fencing—” “Fencing? What century are you from?” “—or solving crimes.” “Are you prescribing me your company, Doctor?” “Detective, you can read me like a book.” She lifted her glass, and I clinked mine against it.
Brittany Cavallaro (A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1))
His eyes are golden brown when he’s intrigued by something. He’s regal-looking and handsome, but he’s more interested in formulas and solving crimes than he is in me or poetry. He acts devilishly warm one moment, then frigid the next,” I said. “So there will be no children or any beautiful paradise in our future. Most of the time I cannot even tolerate his presence. His arrogance is… I don’t know. Annoying.
Kerri Maniscalco (Stalking Jack the Ripper (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #1))
Solving crimes is like following a spider web. Everything is connected in some way. It's just figuring out where things intersect so I can find the spider in the middle.
Lisa Kessler (Lure of Obsession (Muse Chronicles, #1))
I experienced what can only be described as a surreal moment in time; giddy with the prospect of a challenging case, but disheartened with the senseless death of a highly respected judge and family man. Why had he been murdered? Who was the killer? Why hadn’t the Tallahassee police been able to solve the case?
Behcet Kaya (Appellate Judge (Jack Ludefance, #3))
Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no.
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
He looked a bit more confused by Stevie and David, but nodded politely. “I’m a watch ad,” David said. “She’s a hipster grandpa. Together, we solve crime.
Maureen Johnson (The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2))
So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me. And the accicide, the student, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I assist your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
I should prefer that you do not mention my name at all in connection with this case, as I choose to be only associated with those crimes which present some difficulty in their solution.
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventure of the Cardboard Box)
I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity, it is certainly beyond me.
Arthur Conan Doyle (Die Teufelskralle (Sherlock Holmes Chronicles 24))
Most investigators don't even know what the word means. You stop the cops from using informants and the only crimes they'd ever solve would be those by deranged postal workers who come to work once too often.
Andrew Vachss (False Allegations (Burke, #9))
Besides, there's no one way to be a girl, Tay. You don't need to fit yourself into what society tells us a girl should be. Girls can be whoever they want. Whether that's an ass-kicking, sarcastic, crime-solving FBI Agent or a funny, gorgeous, witty beauty queen--or both at the same time." She swings an arm around me and pulls me in. "Are you happy the way you are? Are you comfortable? Do you feel like yourself?" The corner of my mouth lifts into a half smile. "Yes. Yes. And yes." "Then that's all that matters. Fuck everything else.
Jen Wilde (Queens of Geek)
Usually I’m asked to solve a case that’s definitely real. Your distress is genuine, however, so I’ll see what I can find out, but I must warn you that I can’t be sure of success. A dream isn’t tangible evidence, after all.
Isabeau Vollhardt (The Casebook of Elisha Grey)
There are no crimes and no criminals in these days. What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.
Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet (Sherlock Holmes, #1))
I love Sherlock Holmes. I've got all his books, leather-bound. What I thought was great about Sherlock Holmes was that not only was he a supersleuth, he was also a hard worker. Not only did he go out and solve the crimes, he came home and wrote it all down. Fantastic. That's why I admire him.
Steve Coogan (Alan Partridge: Every Ruddy Word : All the Scripts: From Radio to TV and Back)
It’s not a sense of justice. Figuring out difficult cases is my hobby. If you measured good and evil deeds by current laws, I would be responsible for many crimes. The same way you all like to solve mysteries and riddles, or clear video games more quickly. For me too, its simply prolonging something I enjoy doing. It’s not justice at all. And if it means being able to clear a case, I don’t play fair, I’m a dishonest, cheating human being who hates losing in truth.
L Lawliet
This is Detective Ashford Ishikawa. Who am I speaking with?” “My name is Jack Ludefance. I’m a private investigator from Santa Rosaria and I’ve been retained by Cindy Hastings through her lawyer, Mr. Hooks, to investigate her father’s murder. Is there way we can get together to talk?” “Why? What are we going to talk about, Mr. Ludefance?” “As I said, Detective Ishikawa, I’ve been hired to investigate the case. I’ve read the police reports. My hat is off to you. Very thorough work.” “Just doing my job. If you’ve read them, and I won’t ask how you got them, I’ll ask you again, what is there for us to talk about?” “Detective, I’m not trying to do your job and I’m not asking you to do my job. This is of mutual interest to both of us. The sooner we solve the crime the better, yes? Think of it this way. I’m your helper.
Behcet Kaya (Appellate Judge (Jack Ludefance, #3))
The inspector sat down on a stair, fired up a cigarette, and entered an immobility contest with a lizard.
Andrea Camilleri (The Snack Thief (Inspector Montalbano, #3))
BAD BLOOD": Stabler and Benson will never forget the case where solving the crime was so much worse than the crime itself.
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
Solving crimes certainly wasn’t as easy as they made it seem in the movies.
Joanne Fluke (Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen, #1))
Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.
Kate Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective)
What I’m talking about is trying to solve a riddle or crime. Emotions play no role there. They’re too messy and complicated.” He leaned on his elbows, staring into my eyes. “But they’re good in other situations, I suppose. For instance—I’ve not yet figured out the formula for love or romance. Perhaps I shall learn one day soon.
Kerri Maniscalco (Stalking Jack the Ripper (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #1))
All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventure of the Norwood Builder - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, #2))
As she left the Medical Center, she didn’t realize that, if only she had been listening more carefully, she could have solved the murder of Femi Adebanjo then and there.
Kwei Quartey (Last Seen in Lapaz)
Call it, 'Slut and the Falcon.' Make us solve crimes!
Ezra Miller in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"
Ty: Your duffelbag is probably full of things you stole from the Institute. Kit: It ... might be. What's that got to do with you, anyway? None of it's yours. Ty: I want to solve crimes. To be a detective. But nobody here cares about that sort of thing.
Cassandra Clare (Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2))
It is no longer enough simply to solve crimes: We modern private detectives must also be able to come up with catchy names for our cases.
Alan Bradley (The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse (Flavia de Luce, #6.5))
Some things in life could not be solved or even contemplated by a rational mind. Roger’s mind, however, had ceased being anywhere near rational about half a bottle of Grand Marnier ago.
Andrew Barrett (Stealing Elgar (The Dead Trilogy, #2))
WAKE Dealing with an alcoholic single mother and endless hours of working at Heather Nursing Home to raise money for college, high-school senior Janie Hannagan doesn’t need more problems. But inexplicably, since she was eight years old, she has been pulled in to people’s dreams, witnessing their recurring fears, fantasies and secrets. Through Miss Stubin at Heather Home, Janie discovers that she is a dream catcher with the ability to help others resolve their haunting dreams. After taking an interest in former bad boy Cabel, she must distinguish between the monster she sees in his nightmares and her romantic feelings for him. And when she learns more about Cabel’s covert identity, Janie just may be able to use her special dream powers to help solve crimes in a suspense-building ending with potential for a sequel. McMann lures teens in by piquing their interest in the mysteries of the unknown, and keeps them with quick-paced, gripping narration and supportive characters.
Lisa McMann
Murder, other than in the most strict forensic sense, is never soluble. That dark human clot can never melt into a lucid, clear suspension. Our detective fiction tells us otherwise: everything is just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive and a means, and you have solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce the complex events.
Alan Moore (From Hell)
Anxiously, he touched the lump on his head again, then felt his injured leg, groaning. "The whole affair is a mystery to me," he said. "Who would want to steal anything from me?" "Perhaps a thief...?" ventured Julius.
Henry Winterfeld (Detectives in Togas)
(I am still not entirely sure what vicars are, since we don’t have them over here. I think they’re like cozy priests? As far as I can tell, they primarily exist in order to solve murders or be murdered on British crime shows.)
T. Kingfisher (A House with Good Bones)
The trouble with solving a crime was there was never just one puzzle; not even in the most straightforward of cases. Just as different witnesses gave differing testimony of the same events, different players on her side had their own takes on how the puzzles should best be solved.
Daniel B. Greene (Breach of Peace (Lawful Times, #1))
The Scooby gang doesn’t travel because they are looking for crimes to solve. They travel because they’re one step ahead of the deprogrammers. Somehow, Fred’s got them all snookered. It probably has something to do with the Scooby Snacks.
John Scalzi (Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded)
The biggest problem with true crime has always been its imbalance of villains to heroes. True crime is full of supervillains: Manson, Bundy, Gacy. But the superheroes are rarely acknowledged.
Billy Jensen (Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders)
So many crimes are solved by a happy accident—by the random stopping of a car, by an overhead remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi…
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch #2))
Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that’s not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives?
Christopher Fowler (Ten Second Staircase (Bryant & May, #4))
When the lights suddenly go out, hold onto your diamonds for dear life. - Nancy Drew, The Mystery of Lilac Inn
Carolyn Keene
If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology. BRUCE SCHNEIER Cyber
Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
In most towns, the police do not rely on an old woman, two kids, and a sleepy dog to solve crimes,
Michael Buckley (The Unusual Suspects (The Sisters Grimm #2))
My resume is worthless—it turns out that managing a now-defunct video store in your twenties while solving monster crimes qualifies you for absolutely nothing else.
David Wong (What the Hell Did I Just Read (John Dies at the End, #3))
Whoever said violence never solved anything doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Violence is the only language some people understand. Not that I’m fluent, but I know enough to get by.
Timothy S. Miller
I'm not a detective from Baker Street or an old lady who solves crimes while she's knitting in an easy chair. I'm just a book girl. So I can't make a deduction, only take a flight of fancy--er, forget I said that. I meant, I can only take a guess.
Mizuki Nomura (Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime)
I can't solve the crime unless I know everything and the world can't end with the crime unsolved, that's all there is to it, so I tighten my grip on her shoulders and demand that she remember.
Ben H. Winters (World of Trouble (The Last Policeman, #3))
Being able to walk through walls or disappear weren't the only skills my cats had. They seemed to have an uncanny ability to, well, solve crime. They were like two small, furry Sherlock Holmeses.
Sofie Kelly (A Tale of Two Kitties (A Magical Cats Mystery, #9))
Our greatest conflicts and barriers exist in our minds and in the way we deal with our fears. It is pointless even to try to control that which cannot be controlled. What we can manage is how we approach and respond to our uncertainties.
Sue Black (All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes)
Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited? Norman Spinrad: I think it’s a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov’s, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn’t. The supposed dichotomy between “literary fiction” and “popular fiction” is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, did not have serious literary intent? As writers of serious literary intent, they didn’t want to be “popular,” meaning sell a lot of books? They wanted to be unpopular and have terrible sales figures to prove they were “serious”? I say this is bullshit and I say the hell with it. “Genre,” if it means anything at all, is a restrictive commercial requirement. “Westerns” must be set in the Old West. “Mysteries” must have a detective solving a crime, usually murder. “Nurse Novels” must have a nurse. And so forth. In the strictly literary sense, neither science fiction nor fantasy are “genres.” They are anti-genres. They can be set anywhere and anywhen except in the mimetic here and now or a real historical period. They are the liberation of fiction from the constraints of “genre” in an absolute literary sense.
Norman Spinrad
Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.’ It is strangely comforting to be granted tacit permission to make mistakes just because we are human.
Sue Black (All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes)
Harry sensed the onset of resignation. No, he bloody didn't! On the FBI course they had examined cases where it had taken more than ten years to catch the killer. As a rule, it had been one tiny random detail, it seemed, that had solved the case. However, what actually cracked it was the fact that they had never given up, they had gone all fifteen rounds and if the opponent was still standing they screamed for a return fight.
Jo Nesbø
Oh C'mon. Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives. That's not cynicism, that's maturity. You can't stop the rain. All you can do is just build a roof that you hope won't leak, or at least leak on the people who are gonna vote for you.
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).
Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)
I will only write the novel, if I can solve the crime
Andrew Hixson
If you get killed in America, there is a 38 percent chance your killer won’t be caught.
Billy Jensen (Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders)
The killers were still out there, not only escaping justice for the stories I told but free to kill again, believing they had the right to take someone else’s life.
Billy Jensen (Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders)
Most high school students have hobbies. Some play music. Some play sports. Some write , or draw or make things. Stephanie ( Stevie ) Bell solves CRIME
Maureen Johnson (The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious, #4))
Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn't need him to solve crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The audience, Arthur. The audience needs Watson as an intermediary, so that Holmes's thoughts might be forever kept just out of reach. If you told stories from Holmes's perspective, everyone would know what the bleeding genius was thinking the whole time. They'd have the culprit fingered on page one.
Graham Moore (The Sherlockian)
I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions—poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed—which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.
Howard Zinn (You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times)
There's a joke people tell in the Soviet Union: Mitterrand, Bush and Gorbachev have a meeting with God. Mitterrand says, 'My country faces many difficult problems-- lagging exports, Muslim minorities, European unification. How long will it be before France's problems are solved?' God says, 'Fifteen years.' Mitterrand begins to cry. 'I'm an old man,' says Mitterrand. 'I'll be dead by then. I'll never see France's problems solved.' Then Bush says, 'My country faces many difficult problems-- recession, crime, racial prejudice. How long will it be before America's problems are solved?' God says, 'Ten years.' Bush begins to cry. 'I'm an old man,' says Bush. 'I'll be out of office by then. I won't get any credit for solving America's problems.' Then Gorbachev says, 'My country faces many, many difficult problems. How long will it be before the Soviet Union's problems are solved?' God begins to cry.
P.J. O'Rourke (Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer)
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them — or, often, ferreting them out — is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
The stark truth is, of course, that grief never dies. The American counsellor Lois Tonkin reminds us that loss isn’t something we ‘get over’, and it doesn’t necessarily lessen, either. It remains at the core of us and we just expand our lives around it, burying it deeper from the surface. So with time it may become more distant, more compartmentalised and therefore easier to manage, but it does not go away.
Sue Black (All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes)
Things only became real when I would tell him,” he said. “And much of the work I was doing was for him, to make him proud, to make him happy. My dad was kind of like the cashier window at the casino. Things that would happen were just chips, but when I told my dad, it would turn into money. And that went away.
Billy Jensen (Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders)
Jane smiled. ‘I’m very proud of you, dear. I hope you know that.’ ‘Thank you, my love.’ He squeezed her hand and chuckled. ‘Although I fear your Miss Marple would probably have solved the crime faster.’ ‘Surely not.
Harriet Steel (Trouble in Nuala (The Inspector de Silva Mysteries #1))
The emperor leaned back in his seat. His cup of chocolate steamed, veiling his face as he tipped his chin and studied Kestrel with a slanting gaze."Very neat of you, Lady Kestrel. You solve all my worries. You hand me the plains for the low price of poison. How nice that you minimize our enemy's civilian casualties at the same time.
Marie Rutkoski (The Winner's Crime (The Winner's Trilogy, #2))
The homicide skipper that year was a Captain Gregorius, a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, the kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft sap, the kick to the kidneys, the knee to the groin, the fist to the solar plexus, the night stick to the base of the spine. Six months later he was indicted for perjury before a grand jury, booted without trial, and later stamped to death by a big stallion on his ranch in Wyoming. Right now I was his raw meat.
Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe, #6))
This is often the way crimes get solved- through a side door. The clue that led to New York’s “son of Sam” killings was a parking ticket David Berkowitz was issued for parking his Ford Galaxie too close to a fire hydrant near the site of his final murder
John E. Douglas (The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter)
Oh c'mon. Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you ever ""solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives. All you can do is just build a roof that you hope won't leak, or at least won't leak on the people who are gonna vote for you.
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
Whenever people ask me why I only write about unsolved murders, I always say the same thing: because I hate the guy who got away with it. But after Michelle died, it was different. Now I hate the perpetrator for taking over the lives of the living just as much as taking the lives of the dead. The victim’s families. The investigators. The volunteers. they all gave up giant chunks of their own lives to search for an answer that someone selfishly kept hidden away. People die before getting the answer.
Billy Jensen (Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders)
This is CID homicide, mister, and neither heat nor rain nor gloom of night will stay these men from their rendezvous with callousness. Cruel jokes? The cruelest. Sick humor? The sickest. And, you ask, how can they possibly do it? Volume. That’s right, volume. They won’t be outsold, they won’t be undersold; they will solve no crime before its time.
David Simon (Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets)
Just because i have a fedora on doesn't mean i want to help solve crime, but it also doesn't mean that i cant solve crime.
Kiersten Zeitler
If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology. BRUCE SCHNEIER
Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
However, if he really wanted to bust me, all he had to do was ask to see my schoolbooks. The front and back covers are the first place graffiti artists start to draw.
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
To fight adversity, to improvise, to solve problems, and to save the coup, I had gathered all my senses into unusual configurations, which made me grow wild and enhanced my perceptions.
Philippe Petit (Creativity: The Perfect Crime)
So you never really tried to solve the problem. Oh, c’mon. Can you ever “solve” poverty? Can you ever “solve” crime? Can you ever “solve” disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives. That’s not cynicism, that’s maturity. You can’t stop the rain. All you can do is just build a roof that you hope won’t leak, or at least won’t leak on the people who are gonna vote for you. What does that mean? C’mon… Seriously. What does that mean? Fine, whatever, “Mister Smith goes to motherfuckin’ Washington,” it means that, in politics, you focus on the needs of your power base. Keep them happy, and they keep you in office.
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
And he thought how in all the cases he'd solved the heart of crime seemed closer to his waking dreams than his own shadow and that men killed as easily over the momentary wavering of a perception as they did over the endless torturing of their souls. 'Apostle Rising.' They consoled themselves with the merciless beauty of rattlesnakes. They felt their ruined lives run on within them like scars. 'New Bag.' Misery is endurable. It’s happiness that tricks us, offering an unwelcome glimpse into who we really are. 'Lunch With Bella'. Love is the most dangerous force on the planet, not hate. More atrocious acts are perpetrated in its name than in the name of all the other gods that govern human behaviour. For in its hallway of mirrors lie the thousand images of yourself you burned and burn to be and those who know how to caress those silent places steal in there and lie drinking the fresh blood from your soul. 'The Children Of Other Men.
Richard Godwin
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action...You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
Reading is like taking a vacation without having to spend the money and do the work. It’s like a breath of fresh air. You can go to places that don’t really exist or roam old lands.” Brittany paused to catch her breath before continuing. “You can solve crimes without having to deal with the reality of it. You can do anything you’ve ever dreamed of, simply by picking up a book and using your imagination.
Tayler Marie Brooks
The “rising tide” theory rested on a notion of separate but equal class ladders. And so there was a class of black poor and an equivalent class of white poor, a black middle class and a white middle class, a black elite and a white elite. From this angle, the race problem was merely the result of too many blacks being found at the bottom of their ladder—too many who were poor and too few who were able to make their way to the next rung. If one could simply alter the distribution, the old problem of “race” could be solved. But any investigation into the actual details revealed that the ladders themselves were not equal—that to be a member of the “black race” in America had specific, quantifiable consequences. Not only did poor blacks tend to be much less likely to advance up their ladder, but those who did stood a much greater likelihood of tumbling back. That was because the middle-class rung of the black ladder lacked the financial stability enjoyed by the white ladder. Whites in the middle class often brought with them generational wealth—the home of a deceased parent, a modest inheritance, a gift from a favorite uncle. Blacks in the middle class often brought with them generational debt—an incarcerated father, an evicted niece, a mother forced to take in her sister’s kids. And these conditions, themselves, could not be separated out from the specific injury of racism, one that was not addressed by simply moving up a rung. Racism was not a singular one-dimensional vector but a pandemic, afflicting black communities at every level, regardless of what rung they occupied. From that point forward the case for reparations seemed obvious and the case against it thin. The sins of slavery did not stop with slavery. On the contrary, slavery was but the initial crime in a long tradition of crimes, of plunder even, that could be traced into the present day. And whereas a claim for reparations for slavery rested in the ancestral past, it was now clear that one could make a claim on behalf of those who were very much alive.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
Community Policing is a collaborative partnership between the police and law-abiding citizens designed to prevent crime, arrest offenders, solve neighborhood problems and improve the quality of life in the community.
Lee P. Brown (Policing in the 21st Century: Community Policing)
A 2012 CNBC report ranked the fifty states by overall quality of life, and Vermont placed third. New Hampshire, the second-least-religious state, was first in quality of life, and Maine, the third-least-religious state, was fourth in quality of life. At the other end of the list were Alabama (third-most-religious state) ranked forty-seventh for quality of life, and Louisiana (fourth-most-religious state) ranked fiftieth for quality of life.8 A 2012 ranking of the most and least peaceful states in America showed the same pattern. States with the lowest violent crime are 1. Maine, 2. Vermont, and 3. New Hampshire, the three least-religious states in America. The most dangerous state in America, with the highest murder and incarceration rates, is also the fourth-most-religious state, Louisiana.9 Statistics and rankings do not prove that Christianity caused or exacerbates the challenges faced by the most religious states in America, of course. What is clear, however, is that Christianity has not solved its most serious problems, despite repeated assurances from Christians that it can and does.
Guy P. Harrison (50 Simple Questions for Every Christian)
Can you ever “solve” poverty? Can you ever “solve” crime? Can you ever “solve” disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives.
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
(About "From Hell") The idea was to do a documentary comic about a murder. I concluded that there was a way of approaching the [Ripper] murders in a completely different way. I changed the emphasis from 'whodunit' to 'what happened'. I'd seen advertisements for Douglas Adams' book "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". A holistic detective? You wouldn't just have to solve the crime, you'd have to solve the entire world that that crime happened in. That was the twist that I needed.
Alan Moore
A few years back, they jacked David Copperfield in West Palm Beach, for Chrissake. Yes, it's funny: "Yo, empty your pockets," and he pulls out a bunny rabbit. But it's also depressing. If someone who can make himself disappear isn't safe, who is?
Colin Quinn (The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America)
This investigation is nothing more to you than a mere crime among the multitude." Matron Kim's upper lip curled slightly. "My daughter died on her birthday. I made a jeogori jacket for her as a gift, sewed the silk pieces together myself, and I knew the length and circumference of her arms, the length and breadth of her torso, all measured meticulously. I knew her. She was my daughter. And from the day of her death, all you saw was a crime to be solved. From that day, you disrespected my affection for my daughter, and even now, you speak to me with a cruel, impatient look in your eyes.
June Hur (The Silence of Bones)
The fact that police are legally allowed to engage in a wholesale roundup of nonviolent drug offenders does not answer the question why they would choose to do so, particularly when most police departments have far more serious crimes to prevent and solve. Why would police prioritize drug-law enforcement?
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
When Arthur Conan Doyle created the iconic Sherlock Holmes in 1887, he had no idea that his readers would come to think that the investigating detective really existed. But that is what happened: thousands of readers wrote to Sherlock Holmes at 221b Baker Street, asking him to solve an astonishing array of cases. Doyle also received letters full of riddles and unsolved crimes, as everybody believed that someone capable of solving the most difficult fictional crimes would also have the intelligence to solve them in real life. And they were not far from the truth, because Doyle did solve many real cases in the course of his life.
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes)
This new situation, in which "humanity" has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nation does not exist. Furthermore, this dilemma would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a "world government." Such a world government is indeed within the realm of possibility, but one may suspect that in reality it might differ considerably from the version promoted by idealistic-minded organizations. The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. (Hitler's motto that "Right is what is good for the German people" is only the vulgarized form of a conception of law which can be found everywhere and which in practice will remain effectual only so long as older traditions that are still effective in the constitutions prevent this.) A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for—for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number—becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the "good for" applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality. Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.
Barry N. Malzberg (The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (Alternatives SF Series))
Displaced workers, along with others who fear for their livelihood, are fertile ground in which to sow anti-immigrant sentiment, since angry and frustrated people often seek some target on which to blame their problems. The right wing has organized and manipulated such anger and resentment, turned it away from corporations, and directed it against the government, decrying high taxes and the inability of the state to solve problems such as social deterioration, homelessness, crime, and violence. In addition to the target of “failed liberal policies,” immigrants make a convenient and tangible target for people’s anger. Racial prejudice is often an encoded part of the message…Right-wing populist themes are particularly effective at attracting working people disenchanted with the system.
Robert Wald Sussman (The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea)
He capitalized on his police department expertise by frequently writing and speaking on law enforcement themes. One of his topics was “dumb cops.” “About one-third to one-half of the policemen in this country are totally unfit to protect you or to solve crimes,” he declared sweepingly in one article. “They are emotionally unstable, low in mentality and psychologically unsound.” Even worse, he claimed that many cops on the beat were paranoiac, sadistic, and actually insane. “They’re just as dangerous as the thug who steps out from behind the
Jack El-Hai (The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII)
...but wasn't everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn't every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That's the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There's even Edith Pargeter's Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way.
David Sedaris (Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls)
Since the dawn of the twentieth century, we have been told that the federal government has the answers to solve all of society’s problems. We have been promised, by supposedly serious men who have sworn an oath before God and man, that if we just give Washington, D.C., more of our money and more of our personal freedom, the problems of poverty, illiteracy, racism, unemployment, crime, and corruption will all be solved. Today, each and every one of these problems is worse than it has ever been. The federal government and its blood-sucking bureaucracies do not have a solution to the problem, they are the problem.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
It pains me to admit it, but I am somewhat less brilliant than TV supersleuths—and, with all due respect, so are many of my forensic colleagues. We’re not geniuses, and our gadgets can’t answer every question or pinpoint every perpetrator. But even though TV sometimes creates unrealistic expectations about the swiftness and certainty of murder investigations, some shows have done a great service by spotlighting the role forensic scientists—even ordinary, real-life ones—can play in bringing killers to justice. And these shows do get a lot dead right: Crime scene investigation is absolutely crucial to solving a crime. Surprisingly,
William M. Bass (Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales)
The serious crimes committed in the process of trafficking include assault and battery, rape, torture, abduction, sale of human beings, unlawful detention, murder, deprivation of labor rights, and fraud. Yet trafficking is a crime that normally goes unpunished. In the US, for example, around 17,000 people are trafficked into the country and enslaved each year. The country also has 17,000 murders annually. But the national success rate in the US for solving murder cases is about seventy percent. Compare that to the rate for human trafficking. According to the US government’s own numbers, the annual percentage of trafficking and slavery cases solved is less than one percent.
Zoe Trodd (Modern Slavery: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides))
The third stream is the one which has elicited the most criticism. It is referred to as Practical Kabbalah. By that, we mean people who use the Kabbalah for their own personal purposes, as a way to exploit the secret knowledge to which they have access in order to control nature and man’s fate. Practical Kabbalah appeals directly to supernatural forces and sometimes even makes them solve the problems of the one calling upon them. These include attempts to foretell the future, to converse with the dead, to heal the sick, to banish evil spirits and the evil eye, and of course to acquire wealth, respect, and/or the love of a man or a woman. That, too, is a dangerous game to play.
Nathan Erez (The Kabbalistic Murder Code (Historical Crime Thriller #1))
In full intellectual honesty and disclosure I do not believe in the social sciences or sociological studies.  I think the fields are completely bunk and bogus, and are more of a welfare jobs program for unemployable hacks who have political agendas rather than any serious study into society with the goal of helping - let alone resolving - the sociological problems that plague it.  If there was any veracity in the social sciences, we would have solved poverty, crime, divorce, racial/sexual gaps, unemployment, etc., long ago, and the fact these scourges continue to exist – and are in most cases, worsening – is proof enough these “fields” are of no value, perhaps even damaging to society.
Aaron Clarey (The Book of Numbers: Analyzing the ROI on the Pursuit of Women)
if consumer demand should increase for the goods or services of any private business, the private firm is delighted; it woos and welcomes the new business and expands its operations eagerly to fill the new orders. Government, in contrast, generally meets this situation by sourly urging or even ordering consumers to “buy” less, and allows shortages to develop, along with deterioration in the quality of its service. Thus, the increased consumer use of government streets in the cities is met by aggravated traffic congestion and by continuing denunciations and threats against people who drive their own cars. The New York City administration, for example, is continually threatening to outlaw the use of private cars in Manhattan, where congestion has been most troublesome. It is only government, of course, that would ever think of bludgeoning consumers in this way; it is only government that has the audacity to “solve” traffic congestion by forcing private cars (or trucks or taxis or whatever) off the road. According to this principle, of course, the “ideal” solution to traffic congestion is simply to outlaw all vehicles! But this sort of attitude toward the consumer is not confined to traffic on the streets. New York City, for example, has suffered periodically from a water “shortage.” Here is a situation where, for many years, the city government has had a compulsory monopoly of the supply of water to its citizens. Failing to supply enough water, and failing to price that water in such a way as to clear the market, to equate supply and demand (which private enterprise does automatically), New York’s response to water shortages has always been to blame not itself, but the consumer, whose sin has been to use “too much” water. The city administration could only react by outlawing the sprinkling of lawns, restricting use of water, and demanding that people drink less water. In this way, government transfers its own failings to the scapegoat user, who is threatened and bludgeoned instead of being served well and efficiently. There has been similar response by government to the ever-accelerating crime problem in New York City. Instead of providing efficient police protection, the city’s reaction has been to force the innocent citizen to stay out of crime-prone areas. Thus, after Central Park in Manhattan became a notorious center for muggings and other crime in the night hours, New York City’s “solution” to the problem was to impose a curfew, banning use of the park in those hours. In short, if an innocent citizen wants to stay in Central Park at night, it is he who is arrested for disobeying the curfew; it is, of course, easier to arrest him than to rid the park of crime. In short, while the long-held motto of private enterprise is that “the customer is always right,” the implicit maxim of government operation is that the customer is always to be blamed.
Murray N. Rothbard (For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (LvMI))
It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of legislative authority," the Federalist tell us. And modern commanders in chief tend to reflexively invoke the war metaphor when the public demands that they take action to solve the emergency of the month, real or imagined. "War is the health of the state," Randolph Bourne's famous aphorism has it, but Bourne could just as easily written that "war is the health of the presidency." Throughout American history, virtually every major advance in executive power has come during a war or warlike crisis. Convince the public that we are at war, and constitutional barriers to actions fall, as power flows to the commander in chief. Little wonder, then, that confronted with impossible expectations, the modern president tends to recast social and economic problems in military terms: war on crime, war on drugs, war on poverty. Martial rhetoric often ushers in domestic militarism, as presidents push to employ standing armies at home, to fight drug trafficking, terrorism, or natural disasters. And when the president raises the battle cry, he can usually count on substantial numbers of American opinion leaders to cheer him on.
Gene Healy (The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power)