Investigators Quotes

• You do not mess with the special investigators.

  Lee Child

  Special, Mess

  Lee Child (2015). “The Essential Jack Reacher, Volume 1, 7-Book Bundle: Persuader, The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, Bad Luck and Trouble, Nothing to Lose, Gone Tomorrow”, p.992, Delacorte Press

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• I discovered that what most people call creepy, scary, and spooky, I call comfy, cozy, and home.

  Zak Bagans

  Home, People, Scary

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• The practical man is the adventurer, the investigator, the believer in research, the asker of questions, the man who refuses to believe that perfection has been attained.... There is no thrill or joy in merely doing that which any one can do.... It is always safe to assume, not that the old way is wrong, but that there may be a better way.

  Henry Harrower

  Believe, Men, Perfection

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• The investigator should have a robust faith - and yet not believe.

  Claude Bernard

  Believe, Should Have, Belief

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• My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, butintellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.

  W.N.P. Barbellion

  Self, Interesting, Diaries

  W.N.P. Barbellion (2017). “The Journal of a Disappointed Man: & A Last Diary”, p.363, Courier Dover Publications

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• We must remain, in a word, in an intellectual disposition which seems paradoxical, but which, in my opinion, represents the true mind of the investigator. We must have a robust faith and yet not believe.

  Claude Bernard

  Faith, Believe, Science

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• [In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define "serendipity" as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you do things in that way you get unexpected results. Then you do something else and you get unexpected results in another line, and you do that on a third line and then all of a sudden you see that one of these lines has something to do with the other. Then you make a discovery that you never could have made by going on a direct road.

  Irving Langmuir

  Art, Freedom, Science

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• But at the same time, there must never be the least hesitation in giving up a position the moment it is shown to be untenable. It is not going too far to say that the greatness of a scientific investigator does not rest on the fact of his having never made a mistake, but rather on his readiness to admit that he has done so, whenever the contrary evidence is cogent enough.

  William Bayliss

  Giving Up, Mistake, Science

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• Time... is an essential requirement for effective research. An investigator may be given a palace to live in, a perfect laboratory to work in, he may be surrounded by all the conveniences money can provide; but if his time is taken from him he will remain sterile.

  Walter Bradford Cannon

  Taken, Science, Perfect

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• The great experimental principle, then, is doubt, that philosophic doubt which leaves to the mind its freedom and initiative, and from which the virtues most valuable to investigators in physiology and medicine are derived.

  Claude Bernard

  Freedom, Science, Medicine

  Claude Bernard “Experimental Medicine”, Transaction Publishers

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• During the time that [Karl] Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of imununology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do these experiments force us to believe about the nature of the world? I would ask, What is the most. simple and general picture of the world that we can formulate that is not ruled by these experiments? I realized that medical and biological investigators were not attacking their problems the same way that theoretical physicists do, the way I had been in the habit of doing.

  Linus Pauling

  Nature, Believe, Science

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• When an investigator has developed a formula which gives a complete representation of the phenomena within a certain range, he may be prone to satisfaction. Would it not be wiser if he should say 'Foiled again! I can find out no more about Nature along this line.'

  Arthur Eddington

  Nature, Science, Giving

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• The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator, have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse examination!

  Michael Faraday

  Science, Silence, Mind

  Michael Faraday (1859). “Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics”, p.486

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• Science even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, never lies for the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing out of coquetry. She stops before the facts as an investigator, sometimes as a physician, never as an executioner, and still less with hostility and irony.

  Alexander Herzen

  Lying, Teaching, Mean

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• Discovery should come as an adventure rather than as the result of a logical process of thought. Sharp, prolonged thinking is necessary that we may keep on the chosen road but it does not itself necessarily lead to discovery. The investigator must be ready and on the spot when the light comes from whatever direction.

  Theobald Smith

  Adventure, Science, Thinking

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• As soon as we touch the complex processes that go on in a living thing, be it plant or animal, we are at once forced to use the methods of this science [chemistry]. No longer will the microscope, the kymograph, the scalpel avail for the complete solution of the problem. For the further analysis of these phenomena which are in flux and flow, the investigator must associate himself with those who have labored in fields where molecules and atoms, rather than multicellular tissues or even unicellular organisms, are the units of study.

  John Jacob Abel

  Science, Animal, Atoms

  John Jacob Abel, Otto Folin, Theobald Smith (1915). “Experimental and chemical studies of the blood: with an appeal for more extended chemical training for the biological and medical investigator”

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• It's rather naive, apart from being ethically objectionable, to assume that our investigators travel around the country with bags of money trying to bribe witnesses to lie on the witness stand. We just don't operate that way.

  Jim Garrison

  Country, Travel, Lying

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• My high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Inverholl, once had me take an aptitude test to figure out my future. The number one job recommendation for my set of skills was an air traffic accident investigator, of which there are fewer than fifty in the world. The number two job was a museum curator for Chinese-American studies. The number three job was a circus clown.

  Jodi Picoult

  Jobs, School, Skills

  Jodi Picoult (2012). “The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules”, p.1437, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Mean, Would Be, Cop

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• I’m Charlotte Davidson: private investigator, police consultant, all -around badass. Or I could’ve been a badass, had I stuck with those lessons in mixed martial arts. I was only in that class to learn how to kill people with paper.

  Darynda Jones

  Art, Badass, Class

  Darynda Jones (2015). “The Charley Davidson Series”, p.365, St. Martin's Press

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• I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

  Raymond Chandler

  Brother, Couple, Divorce

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Long Goodbye: A Novel”, p.87, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it", was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.

  Aldous Huxley

  Space, Watches, Answers

  Aldous Huxley (2010). “The Doors of Perception: And Heaven and Hell”, p.23, Random House

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• You’re the most experienced investigator I’ve got who’s not tied up in something, and I can’t ask the Consort to look look into it, because A) she and Curran are working on something else and B) when the Consort gets involved, half of the world blows up.

  Ilona Andrews

  Blow, Looks, Half

  Ilona Andrews (2012). “Magic Dreams: A Penguin Special from Ace”, p.54, Penguin

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• It is on record that when a young aspirant asked Faraday the secret of his success as a scientific investigator, he replied, 'The secret is comprised in three words- Work, Finish, Publish.'

  Michael Faraday

  Success, Hard Work, Science

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• The trouble is that all the investigators proceeded in exactly the same spirit, the spirit that is of scientific curiosity, and with no possibility of telling whether the issue of their work would prove them to be fiends, or dreamers, or angels.

  Robert Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh

  Hard Work, Angel, Issues

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