"Darkseid: I like you Glorious Godfrey! You're a shallow, precious child -- The Revelationist -- Happy with the sweeping sound of words! But I am the Revelation! The tiger-force at the core of all things! When you cry out in your dreams--it is Darkseid that you see!"

"Superman: Darkseid lives for manipulation. He has hypnotists, scientists and sadists whose only functions are to break your spirit. Darkseid is evil."

"Darkseid is very evil. He's the equivalent of a mass murderer, but he wouldn't waste his super-powers on just one individual. He wouldn't go out of his way just to kill one man; it would be ridiculous. He wouldn't do it. He'd just walk away. That's how my villains think."

"The brilliance is in the victory, Kanto and now it is time to test the capabilities of this Earth man. Even with these weapons, I am curious if this mortal can actually complete his task. The eradication of the Last Son of Krypton."

"Perhaps too inventive. It is an admirable quality albeit driven by greed. As surely as Superman will fall, Lex Luthor's activities must be closely monitored. Do I make myself clear, Kanto?"

"Yes. And I shall be watching both of you closely. Very closely indeed, Superman."

"Darkseid: To Darkseid there is value in anything that can turn a being of such power into quivering jelly. I think we owe this mother box a debt for relieving his dementia and preserving a record of it for us. Little mother box...you fear me, do you? Haven't you heard that Darkseid is a doddering old fool who spends his days working his cypher? That's right...adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing...I fear this: As long as the Anti-Life Equation is unsolved, as long as a scrap of free will exists anywhere in the universe--then Darkseid remains unfulfilled."

"Darkseid constitutes the kind of men Kirby was acquainted with in his youth. The slum lords, made famous in Will Eisner’s A Contract With God, were men (perhaps women?) with agendas. They operated on morals dictated by their business mindset. The cost of rent, the living conditions, and the quality of life they allowed for their tenants was in line with their standards. To them, that standard was appropriate. To call them “evil” or “unethical” is an inaccurate assessment. They were gods within the worlds they created."

"It was a new technique for making a pass at a man, but it had obvious advantages, and anyway she had plenty of other ideas and wasn't being stingy with them. At lunch she had buttered rolls for him. Now I ask you."

"I responded to his tone as a man of my temperament naturally would — I am congenitally tart and thorny — and I rejected his ultimatum."

"It's okay. He never sleeps in the daytime. His mind works better when he can't see me."

"More than ninety-nine per cent of the bets placed on horse races are outbursts of emotion, not exercises of reason. I restrict my emotions to the activities for which they are qualified."

"Pfui." Wolfe was disgusted. "I have better use for my clients' money than buying information from policemen."

"Much obliged. You remind me of Mr. Wolfe."

"Frequently, twice a week or oftener, you consider the problem of guests for Miss Fraser's program. It is in fact a problem, because you want interesting people, famous ones if possible, but they must be willing to submit to the indignity of lending their presence, and their assent by silence, if nothing more, to the preposterous statements made by Miss Fraser and Mr. Meadows regarding the products they advertise."

"You have no right whatever, Mr. Anderson, except to pay your share of my fee if I earn it. You are here in my office on sufferance. Confound it, I am undertaking to solve a problem that has Mr. Cramer so nonplused that he desperately wants a hint from me before I've even begun. He doesn't mind my rudeness; he's so accustomed to it that if I were affable he'd haul me in as a material witness."

"I mean the purpose she allows her cleverness to serve. That unspeakable prepared biscuit flour! Fritz and I have tried it. Those things she calls Sweeties! Pfui! And that salad dressing abomination — we have tried that too, in an emergency. What they do to stomachs heaven knows, but that woman is ingeniously and deliberately conspiring in the corruption of millions of palates. She should be stopped!"

"One reason I like to work for him is that he never rides me for not acting the way he would act. He knows what I can do and that's all he ever expects; but he sure expects that."

"A man condemning the income tax because of the annoyance it gives him or the expense it puts him to is merely a dog baring its teeth, and he forfeits the privileges of civilized discourse. But it is possible to criticize it on other and impersonal grounds. A government, like an individual, spends money for any or all of three reasons: because it needs to, because it wants to, or simply because it has it to spend. The last is much the shabbiest. It is arguable, if not manifest, that a substantial portion of the great spring flood of billions pouring into the Treasury will in effect get spent for the last shabby reason."

"Well. I won't pretend that I'm exasperated that you're such good friends that you haven't been able to remember what happened. If you had, and had told the police, I might not have this job."

""And that's your story and you like it, huh?" "Of course it is, it's the truth!" I would have liked to use assorted tortures on her in a well-equipped underground chamber."

"It was nothing new for Wolfe to take steps, either on his own or with one or more of the operatives we used, without burdening my mind with it. His stated reason was that I worked better if I thought it all depended on me. His actual reason was that he loved to have a curtain go up revealing him balancing a live seal on his nose."

"This is my department, Mr. Truett." "Not the part of it I'm in at any given moment. Yours is the stock department. Mine is the murder department."

"With him mowed down like that in the dead of night, and with that connection he had, we felt we owed it to the community to cover all angles in an effort to prevent any breath of scandal --"

"A tiger's eyes can't make light, Saul, they can only reflect it. You've spent a day in the dark."

"What do we do when we have no clues? Do you know?" "No, sir." "We make one."

"We all take chances when we exchange words with other human beings."

"One good glance and I liked the job. The girls. ... At least half a thousand of them. and the general and overwhelming impression was of -- clean, young, healthy, friendly, spirited, beautiful and ready. I stood and filled my eyes, trying to look detached. It was an ocean of opportunity. A voice at my elbow said, "I doubt very much if there's a virgin in the room. Now if you'll come to my office...""

"That's the situation, my fat friend, as Charlie McCarthy said to Herbert Hoover."

"You come down from your beautiful orchids day before yesterday and breeze in here and tell me merrily to draw another man-size check for that World Government outfit. When I meekly mention that the science of bookkeeping has two main branches, first addition, and second subtraction —"

"There are numerous layers of honesty, and the deepest should not have a monopoly."

"I'm Structural Metals, but right now I've got thirty-seven elephants in stock, over in Africa, and I can't get any other section to take them. My basic position is that elephants are non-metallic."

"He regarded me with a cold eye. "You know, son," he said finally, "you have one or two good qualities. In a way I even like you. In another way I could stand and watch your hide peeling off and not shed any tears. You have undoubtedly got the goddamdest nerve of anybody I know except maybe Nero Wolfe.""

"Wolfe frowned at her. He hated fights about wills, having once gone so far as to tell a prospective client that he refused to engage in a tug of war with a dead man's guts for a rope."

"Don't complicate matters by assuming for me a cupidity and corruption beyond the limits I have set for myself. You're suffering from an occupational disease. When an international financier is confronted by a holdup man with a gun, he automatically hands over not only his money and jewelry but also his shirt and pants, because it doesn't occur to him that a robber might draw the line somewhere."

"My job is starting you, not stopping you."

"When the last trumpet sounds the Times will want to check with Gabriel himself, and for the next edition will try to get it confirmed by even Higher Authority."

"I carry this fat to insulate my feelings. They got too strong for me once or twice and I had that idea. If I had stayed lean and kept moving around I would have been dead long ago. ... I used to be idiotically romantic. I still am, but I've got it in hand."

"War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread."

"The story had it that Noel Hawthorne's arrow which had accidentally struck his beautiful wife had plowed diagonally across from the brow to the chin, and what was left was there behind that veil—with, it was said, one eye working—and that was what I looked at. You couldn't help it. The gray veil was fastened to her hat and extended below her chin … She was medium-sized, with what would ordinarily be called a nice youthful figure, only with the veil and knowing why it was there, you didn't have the feeling of anything being nice. I sat and stared at it, trying to ignore an inclination to offer somebody a ten-spot to pull the veil up, knowing that if it was done I'd probably offer another ten-spot to get it pulled down again."

"I don't know how a brain that is never used passes the time."

"Mr. Wolfe is in the middle of a fit. It's complicated. There's a fireplace in the front room, but it's never lit because he hates open fires. He says they stultify mental processes. But it's lit now because he's using it. He's seated in front of it, on a chair too small for him, tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster's New International Dictionary, Unabridged, published by the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language. In the past week he has given me a thousand examples of its crimes. He says it is a deliberate attempt to murder the — I beg your pardon. I describe the situation at length because he told me to bring you in there, and it will be bad."

""What's the difference between a Catholic and a river that runs uphill?" She didn't know, and I told her..."

""No." Lily was firm. "The fricassee with dumplings is made by a Mrs. Miller whose husband has left her four times on account of her disposition and returned four times on account of her cooking and is still there." ... The fricassee came, and the first bite, together with dumpling and gravy, made me marvel at the hellishness of Mrs. Miller's disposition, to drive a man away from that."

"Of course you don't learn anything about people in general by walking around taking them in; you only learn things about this one or that one. I learned something that morning about a girl in a grey checked suit who caught her heel in a grating on Second Avenue in the Eighties. No girl I had ever known would have done what she did. Maybe no other girl in the world would. But I shouldn't have got started about walking."

"Once he burned up a cookbook because it said to remove the hide from a ham end before putting it in the pot with lima beans. Which he loves most, food or words, is a tossup."

"No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket or at least had been fooling around with timetables."

"Mr. Kates, I have known Wolfe for twenty years, and I can tell you why we were invited here this evening. We were invited because he wanted to learn all he could as quick as he could, without leaving his chair and without Goodwin's buying gas and wearing out his tires."

"One of the brain's most efficient departments is the one that turns possibilities into probabilities, and probabilities into facts."