Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

I’ll say this for the Queen. She was brave—or possibly stupid. It’s easy to mistake the two.

Anything that can go wrong with armed men in the light can go twice as wrong in the dark.

There were a couple of mentions of drones, but the assumption was that they were operated by the police, the gangs, space lizards or all three at once. The media were continuing their comforting lack of interest in things that didn’t fit their various agendas.

A lot of people have died in the Underground, through accidents, stupidity, or suicide. All the one-unders who'

Lives to act, poor thing, it's all he ever wanted out of life."
"Except he's dead," I said.
"I know," said Mr. Punch. "Isn't the universe wonderful.

I don’t like the fact that all we have so far is that somebody did something to somebody at some time which may or may not have some fucking connection so some other people who we’re not sure still exist.

I find you get two types of police, those that don’t want to know and those that do. Unfortunately, dealing with things you don’t want to know about is practically a definition of policing.

I am a goddess, Peter, a creature of temperament and whimsy. I’m supposed to be arbitrary and mercurial—it’s practically my job description.

One of the advantages of being the police is that when you want to buy something slightly dodgy, you generally know where to shop.

None of this was real.
But I’ve learned that just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean it’s not important.

It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning.

Policing is about moving from the unknown to the known and then further—to the provable.

Nice," said Abigail. "Very plausible."
"Yeah, but just because it's plausible doesn't mean it's true.

Flexible," I said. "Meaning we're making it up as we go along.

You don’t actually know enough about me to insult me properly.