Quotes About Distrust

The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally.

I had taken a partner once before-but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open.

Never appeal to a man's better nature. He may not have one.

I told you when you hired him that—" "When I hired him?" "Don't interrupt. —that any man who would take money two ways would take it three ways just as quickly.

I often calculate odds on horse races; the civil service computermen frequently program such requests. But the results are so at variance with expectations that I have concluded either that the data is too meager, or the horses or riders are not honest. Possibly all three.

before a revolution can take place, the population must lose faith in both the police and the courts.

He even let himself be vaccinated again rather than go back to the I Spy and dig out the piece of paper that showed he had been vaccinated on arrival Earthside a few weeks earlier.

Gramp had a heavy hand. 'Never take anybody's word about whether a gun is loaded.

In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police game — even as victim, or citizen being monitored — will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia.

When people with guns treat you as possibly guilty, you begin to feel possibly guilty.

here hadn't said he knew you, I'da run you in already. The

Probably the easiest and most efficient approach was to hate everybody. Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson?

She was afrad of him, now. Yes, she must be. Because not once, all through this, had she called him son.

My first thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the working of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

John Chen was a paranoid. He knew this about himself, just as he knew he had low self-esteem, a poor self-image, and a cornucopia of insecurities. But he also knew an enemy when he saw one. Even paranoids had enemies.

Hey, we've got this guy, Dan! He's ours!" Dan Tomsic stared at her with the disdain he reserved for shitbirds, defense attorneys, and card-carrying members of the ACLU. He said, "It's easier to cut off your own goddamned leg than convict a rich man in this state, detective. Haven't you been around long enough to know that?

Scott parked in plain view by a gnarled podocarpus tree, nose to nose with the Jeep. He tucked the suspect sketch into his pocket, got out, and went to the edge of the slope. Cole and his buddies were watching him like three crows on a fence. A rumpled black cat with a crooked ear was watching him, too. The cat's eyes were hateful. Cole

Karbo and Bender continued talking, but Pike sensed something off in how they related to each other. Karbo flashed a perfunctory smile and Bender seemed uncomfortable. Their handshake had been businesslike, and they stood a step too far apart. They seemed more like strangers who were meeting for the first time than friends who would commit a spur-of-the-moment abduction.

a cop shouted our location to the people on the road. Krantz wasn't holding a gun, but his eyes were on Pike as if he were a down-range target. I expected him to start with our rights, or tell us we were under arrest, or maybe even gloat, but he didn't.

She didn't say anything for a time, and then she said, "Well, in this case the powers that be are probably right." I nodded, but she probably couldn't see it. "I don't believe Truly had a secret agreement with Teddy Martin. Green fabricated that, just as he fabricated the business about Pritzik and Richards.

When Pike turned back, Cole pointed at the corner of the roof. A pale blue alarm panel was mounted near the end of the building, but the cover was missing. Old wires had been cut, and new wires had been clipped to bypass the old. Whoever jumped the alarms hadn't bothered to replace the cover, as if they didn't care whether or not their work was discovered.

He simply trusted people at the bottom, like the plant managers in the Midwest—for whom economics were never abstract—and distrusted people at the top.

G]ood people are rarely suspicious: they cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing; usually they accept the undramatic solution as the correct one, and let matters rest there.

People never believe anything - except scandal - when they first hear it.