"Hannibal Lecter: I've read the case files. Have you? Everything you need to find him is right there in those pages. Clarice Starling: Then tell me how. Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice: simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius, "Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?" What does he do, this man you seek? Clarice Starling: He kills women. Hannibal Lecter: No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does, what needs does he serve by killing? Clarice Starling: Anger, social acceptance, and, uh, sexual frustration ... Hannibal Lecter: No, he covets. That's his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer, now. Clarice Starling: No. We just ... Hannibal Lecter: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day."
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Ted Tally (1991), Silence of the Lambs screenplay, adapted from the novel by Thomas Harris; Lecter is paraphrasing or quoting an alternate translation of Meditations Book VIII, 11: "This thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material?" (George Long translation, 1862)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius
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Marcus Aurelius
politician, philosopher, writer
121 – 180 · Ancient Rome
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (26 April 121 – 17 March 180) was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors (a term coined some 13 centuries later by Niccolò Machiavelli), and the last emperor of the Pax Romana (27 BC to 180), an age of relative peace and stability for the Roman Empire. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
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