Too Many Cooks Quotes

“What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Of course, a hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Enforced courtesy is worse than none.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“I wouldn’t use physical violence even if I could, because one of my romantic ideas is that physical violence is beneath the dignity of a man, and that whatever you get by physical aggression costs more than it is worth.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Few of us have enough wisdom for justice, or enough leisure for humanity.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“[T]he human equipment includes, for instance, a capacity for personal affection and a willingness to strangle selfish and predatory impulse with the rope of social decency.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“He threw up his hands and waved them around, and shook all over, and laughed as if he never expected to hear a joke again and would use it all up on this one.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Can Mr. Wolfe help it if an attractive young fellow insists on coming to cry on his shoulder?”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“A pig whose diet is fifty to seventy percent peanuts grows a ham of incredibly sweet and delicate succulence which, well-cured, well-kept and well-cooked, will take precedence over any other ham the world affords.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“The agreements of human society embrace not only protection against murder, but thousands of other things, and it is certainly true that in America—not to mention other continents—the whites have excluded the blacks from some of the benefits of those agreements. It is said that the exclusion has sometimes even extended to murder—that in parts of this country a white man may kill a black one, if not with impunity, at least with a good chance of escaping the penalty which the agreement imposes. That’s bad. It’s deplorable, and I don’t blame black men for resenting it. But you are confronted with a fact, not a theory, and how do you propose to change it?”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“The guest is a jewel resting on the cushion of hospitality. The host is king, in his parlor and his kitchen, and should not condescend to a lesser role. So we won’t discuss—”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Indeed.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. “Have you eaten terrapin stewed with butter and chicken broth and sherry?”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Telephone calls were to be handled by me, since he knew nothing that I didn’t know. (This jarred my aplomb, since it was the first time he had ever admitted it.)”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Courtesy is one’s own affair, but decency is a debt to life.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“You might have thought we were bound for the stratosphere to shine up the moon and pick wild stars.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“These smokes can take it, they’re used to it.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“The ideal human agreement is one in which distinctions of race and color and religion are totally disregarded;”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks