The Great Train Robbery Quotes

“Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“should the police actually succeed in eliminating all crime, they will simultaneously succeed in eliminating themselves as a necessary adjunct to society, and no organized force or power will ever eliminate itself willingly.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“ordinary Western urban man still clings to the belief that crime results from poverty, injustice, and poor education.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“It seemed a simple matter of eliminating the cause and, in due course, the effect. From this comfortable perspective, it was absolutely astonishing to discover that “the criminal class” had found a way to prey upon progress—and indeed to carry out a crime aboard the very hallmark of progress, the railway.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“She appeared nearly helpless—quite the ordinary way of a female when asked to deal with technical matters.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“When the English introduced the new Enfield rifle in 1857, the cartridges for the rifle came from the factory liberally coated with grease. It was necessary to bite the cartridges to release the powder. Among the sepoy regiments there was a rumor that the grease was made from pigs and cows, and thus these cartridges were a trick to defile the sepoys and make them break caste.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“London shops copied the woolen jacket he had worn in the Crimea—called a “Cardigan”—and thousands were sold.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“was reinforced by her education, and many well-bred women probably were the simpering, tittering, pathologically delicate fools that populate the pages of Victorian novels.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“Yet there was also widespread public complacency, for the fundamental assumption of Victorians was that progress—progress in the sense of better conditions for all mankind—was inevitable.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“It is difficult, after the passage of more than a century, to understand the extent to which the train robbery of 1855 shocked the sensibilities of Victorian England. At first glance, the crime hardly seems”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“It was terribly important that such women should marry. The failure to marry--spinsterhood--implied a kind of dreadful crippling, for it was universally acknowledged that "a woman's true position was that of administratrix, mainspring, guiding star of the home," and if she was unable to perform this function, she became a sort of pitiful social misfit, an oddity.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“Pierce himself later said, "It is the demeanor which is respected among these people. They know the look of fear, and likewise its absence, and any man who is not afraid makes them afraid in turn.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery

“This is precisely the kind of critical turnabout that has always frustrated and infuriated architects. No less a figure than Sir Christopher Wren, writing tow hundred years earlier, complained that "the peoples of London may despise some eyesore until it is demolished, whereupon by magick the replacement is deemed inferior to the former edifice, now eulogized in high and glowing reference.”
― Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery