The Great Train Robbery Quotes

Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police.

ordinary Western urban man still clings to the belief that crime results from poverty, injustice, and poor education.

should the police actually succeed in eliminating all crime, they will simultaneously succeed in eliminating themselves as a necessary adjunct to society, and no organized force or power will ever eliminate itself willingly.

It seemed a simple matter of eliminating the cause and, in due course, the effect. From this comfortable perspective, it was absolutely astonishing to discover that “the criminal class” had found a way to prey upon progress—and indeed to carry out a crime aboard the very hallmark of progress, the railway.

Yet there was also widespread public complacency, for the fundamental assumption of Victorians was that progress—progress in the sense of better conditions for all mankind—was inevitable.

was reinforced by her education, and many well-bred women probably were the simpering, tittering, pathologically delicate fools that populate the pages of Victorian novels.

London shops copied the woolen jacket he had worn in the Crimea—called a “Cardigan”—and thousands were sold.

When the English introduced the new Enfield rifle in 1857, the cartridges for the rifle came from the factory liberally coated with grease. It was necessary to bite the cartridges to release the powder. Among the sepoy regiments there was a rumor that the grease was made from pigs and cows, and thus these cartridges were a trick to defile the sepoys and make them break caste.

Some inconsistencies are the product of Apple’s mythmaking rather than PARC’s. The idea that Steve Jobs and his troops saw in PARC a priceless, squandered gem aims to say as much about Jobs’s peerless perspicacity as Xerox’s obtuseness. The author who wrote, “You can have your Lufthansa Heist, your Great Train Robbery…the slickest trick of all was Apple’s daylight raid on the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center” perhaps desired more to promote a heroic vision of Apple than to get at what really happened.

This is precisely the kind of critical turnabout that has always frustrated and infuriated architects. No less a figure than Sir Christopher Wren, writing tow hundred years earlier, complained that "the peoples of London may despise some eyesore until it is demolished, whereupon by magick the replacement is deemed inferior to the former edifice, now eulogized in high and glowing reference.

It was terribly important that such women should marry. The failure to marry--spinsterhood--implied a kind of dreadful crippling, for it was universally acknowledged that "a woman's true position was that of administratrix, mainspring, guiding star of the home," and if she was unable to perform this function, she became a sort of pitiful social misfit, an oddity.

Pierce himself later said, "It is the demeanor which is respected among these people. They know the look of fear, and likewise its absence, and any man who is not afraid makes them afraid in turn.

I turn a corner, leaving the nonfiction section, and almost bump right into Jensen. “Hey, Wayfare,” he says, looking at my stack of thick, hardback books. “Doing a little light reading?” “Heh. Yeah.” I veer past him and head for a table in the back, hoping he doesn’t follow. He does. Great. The books topple from my arms and onto the table. A couple tumble to the floor. Jensen retrieves them for me and looks at the titles. “Famous Train Robberies of the 1800s,” he says. “Rare and Priceless United States Coins.” He quirks a brow at me. “Going treasure hunting?” I actually let myself smile. “Yep. I’m traveling back in time to thwart a heist. Want to come along?” “Sure. Is your time machine a two-seater?” “No, but it’s got a trunk.

Eventually, film required better projector technology to be commercially successful, and Edison withdrew from the industry as other inventors made headway. The best known of these was Edwin S. Porter and his 1903 film The Great Train Robbery.

It was in the reign of Conn, at the very end of the second, or beginning of the third century that was founded the Fian — a great standing army of picked and specially trained, daring warriors, whose duty was to carry out the mandates of the high-king — “To uphold justice and put down injustice, on the part of the kings and lords of Ireland — and to guard the harbors from foreign invaders.” From this latter we might conjecture that an expected Roman invasion first called the Fian into existence. They were soldiers in time of war, and a national police in time of peace. We are informed that they prevented robberies, exacted fines and tributes, put down public enemies and every kind of evil that might afflict the country. Moreover they moved about from place to place, all over the island. During the summer and harvest, from Beltinne to Samain — May first till November first — they camped in the open, and lived by the chase. During the winter half-year they were quartered upon the people. But Fionn, being a chieftain himself in his own right, had a residence on the hill of Allen (Almuin) in Kildare.

he was trapped in the form of a frog inside a novelty snow globe

asid,

They used to be our biggest trade partners, before things turned sour with the giants and the Premier ordered all our beanstalks chopped down.

The flux compressor?

It is difficult, after the passage of more than a century, to understand the extent to which the train robbery of 1855 shocked the sensibilities of Victorian England. At first glance, the crime hardly seems