Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.
They say all the world loves a lover – apply that saying to murder and you have an even more infallible truth.
I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose their head and do the most absurd things.
Even the most sober of us is liable to have his head turned by success.
What they need is a little immorality in their lives. Then they wouldn’t be so busy looking for it in other people’s.
The body – the cage – is everything of the most respectable – but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.
In the midst of tragedy we start the comedy.
Every woman makes a fool of herself once in her life.
You won’t turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures just yet awhile – but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with.
There’s nothing like death for bringing out the meanness of human nature.
Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law. If a man commits a crime, any other crime he commits will resemble it closely.
Man is a vain animal.
