Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

When you’re four, forever and ever can mean yesterday.

“The timing might not be significant,” I said. “Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re related.”
Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

As police you can live with the violence, the squalor and the stupidity—it’s the waste of people’s futures that really grinds you down.

Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.

Now I was used to it, the bell-like silence was louder than ever, and I was starting to get undertones of orange blossom and incense. You have to be careful with this stuff or you begin to sound like a wine taster—with about the same amount of meaningless bollocks.

Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis—he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land. Since the principle of any rich person who wants to stay rich is, never give anything away unless you absolutely have to, the land has stayed with Crown ever since.

Technically, you don't have to have a corpse to convict for murder but detectives always feel better when they've found your actual victim—they're superstitious like that.

It’s no fun looking down on people if you can’t let them know you’re above them.

Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song.

So just chalk it up to pixie dust or quantum entanglement, which was the same thing as pixie dust except with the word “quantum” in it.

There's more to life than just London," said Nightingale.
"People keep saying that," I said. "But I've never actually seen any proof.

I'm interested in history," I said. "Why don't you tell me what happened."
"Why would a young man like you be interested in history?"
"So I can avoid repeating it.

It’s a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.

You don’t get to be a senior investigating officer unless you have a degree in skepticism, an MA in distrust and your CV lists suspicious bastard under your hobbies.

Are you smarter than me?"
"I'll answer that when you give me a working definition of intelligence.