legal studies quote authors

“When we started putting the facts together on how much information we actually had, on the leads that we had, to find out what we had, we found out we didn’t have anything.”

The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris, a detective 

“A bookmark lay between its pages, a stiff piece of watered silk upon which an admonition had been embroidered: “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.”

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote - narrator

“Old Mr. Fleming, a classic country lawyer more happily at home with land deeds than ill deeds, opened the cross-examination.”

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote - narrator

“Psychiatry has matured rapidly in the past twenty years. The federal courts are beginning to keep in tune with this science as related to people charged with criminal offenses. It just seems to me we have a golden opportunity to face up to the new concepts in this field.”

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote - prosecutor

“I fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done.”

Going to See a Man Hanged - Thackeray - narrator

“I was willing to take that gamble. And it wasn’t because of anything the Clutters did. They never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it’s just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.”

In Cold Blood - Capote - Perry

“I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight; and that I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us, and to cleanse our land of blood.”

Going to See a Man Hanged - Thackeray - narrator

“Tonight, having dried and brushed her hair and bound it in a gauzy bandana, she set out the clothes she intended to wear to church the next morning: nylons, black pumps, a red velveteen dress—her prettiest, which she herself had made. It was the dress in which she was to be buried” (Capote 56).

In Cold Blood - Capote - narrator