Who are you? You don't belong to the police?' 'I am better than the police,' said Poirot. He said it without conscious arrogance. It was, to him, a simple statement of fact.
The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.
You don't realize what fine fighting material there is in age. ... You show me any one who's lived to over seventy and you show me a fighter - some one who's got the will to live.
I have wanted . . . to commit a murder myself. I recognized this as the desire of the artist to express himself! . . . But-incongruous as it may seem to some-I was restrained and hampered by my innate sense of justice. The innocent must not suffer.
It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.
... the belief in a superstratum of human beings ... is the most evil of all beliefs. For when you say, 'I am not as other men' -- you have lost the two most valuable qualities we have ever tried to attain: -- humility and brotherhood.
That was what, ultimately, war did to you. It was not the physical dangers--the mines at sea, the bombs from the air, the crisp ping of a rifle bullet as you drove over a desert track. No, it was the spiritual danger of learning how much easier life was if you ceased to think.