Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police de… - Ben Aaronovitch

If they were ugly, Peter, would you care half so much?" asked Nightingale. "There are some hideous things out there that can talk and reason, and I wonder if you would be quite so quick to rush to their defense."
"Maybe not," I said. "But that just makes me shallow, it doesn't make me wrong.

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

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.