Erle Stanley Gardner Quotes

I have one weapon, Mason said. It's a powerful weapon. But sometimes it's hard to wield it because you don't know just where to grab hold of it.

The secretary was a good-looking girl—or would have been if she’d given herself a chance. Some discouraging experience in her background had made her feel that she couldn’t be bothered with sex appeal...

Life is like that. We can only see from birth to death. The rest of it is cut from our vision. Drake

Of the murder and whether he could possibly have been out there at the country club at the time the murder was committed. There’s not a chance. At the time the murder must have been committed, Hedley...

Angeles in the plain-clothes division,

When a man starts running away from things in life he builds up a whole chain of complexes and fear.

You might be interested in his economic philosophy, Mr. Mason. He believed men attached too much importance to money as such. He believed a dollar represented a token of work performed, that men were...

Pool our information, Dimmick said, to work out a joint plan of campaign. Thank you, I don’t think I’d care to do that, Mason told him. I want to be free to represent my client in whatever way seems b...

You Can Die Laughing (1957) Some

People, he said, try to put on a poker face when they are in a panic and when they try to put on a poker face they look sulky.

We’re a dramatic people, Perry Mason said slowly. We’re not like the English. The English want dignity and order. We want the dramatic and the spectacular. It’s a national craving. We’re geared to a r...

Objected to as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,

Clinton Foley is living? Of course he’s living. He’s living next door

And then what happens to the reformer, lover? He either has to build up a political machine or else he’s defeated at the next election. If he builds up a political machine, he has to do it by distribu...

He called the police and told them I was trying to blackmail him. Were you? Not exactly. Bertha was trying to cut herself a piece of cake, and— And what? I asked. And the knife slipped, she said.

Della Street, Perry Mason’s confidential secretary, said, A couple of lovebirds have strayed into the office without an appointment. They insist it’s a matter of life and death. Everything is, Mason s...

It takes a powerful motivation to lead to murder. That’s why people don’t usually murder comparative strangers.

Every eight years, the people swallow some politician hook, line, and sinker and make him president. They hold him on the political stomach for about six years. Then they commence to get indigestion b...

Calling for

We have graft today. A hundred years ago we had graft. We probably have more today than we had a hundred years ago. For three generations now people have been following reformers, fighting all sort of...