Wish I'd said that - October 14, 2020

“The criminologist and sociologists are right, then, when they tell us that man is a ‘cooperating animal.’ But what they rarely realize is that cooperation only works if someone is willing to punish infractions. It must be done as a purely neutral phenomenon, with the punishment fitting the crime, not the criminal. Ideally, every individual should carry with him the remorseless sense that somewhere someone cares whether they break the law.”

William Tucker Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America

Wish I'd said that - October 10, 2020

“’Your chief trouble,’ he [a mid-rank gangster to the narrator, Archie Goodwin] said, not offensively, ‘is that you think you’ve got a sense of humor. It confuses people, and you ought to get over it. Things strike you as funny.... but someday something that you think is funny will blow your g****m head right off your shoulders.’ Only after he had gone did it occur to me that that wouldn’t prove it wasn’t funny.”

Rex Stout In the Best Families