It was the sort of overly complex plan dreamed up by armchair manipulators who thought they could play chess with the universe and didn’t realize that the universe ignored rulebooks.

“You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by chess,” he assured her. “It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game for lunatics—or else it creates them.”

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city, He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.

You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by chess," he assured her. "It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game for lunatics—or else it creates them.

Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.

Chess is the gymnasium of the mind

He was very clever, he gave the impression of being tolerant and kind, while actually being very dark, very cunning.

I achieved more than I could dream of in chess and in chess composing.

Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.

Watson could so easily have been brushed aside as a crazy kid and an arrogant pest, whose great discovery was a fluke based on others' data. But after much agonizing over what he would do for an encore, he settled for a career of getting things goings. He became an intellectual manager on a vast scale without showing the fatherly instincts of a Niels Bohr.

You know, Watson, I don't mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal.

Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such,
We scarcely can praise it, or blame it too much;
Who, born for the universe, narrow'd his mind,
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind;
Though fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat
To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.
Who too deep for his hearers still went on refining,
And thought of convincing while they thought of dining:
Though equal to all things, for all things unfit;
Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit.

This book is about taking the vision and mindset of a chess master and applying it to business.