228 Quotes by Rex Stout

One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there’s always some reason to live another year. And I’d like to live another year so that Nixon won’t be President. If he’s re-elected I’ll have to live another four years.

The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person,” – Nero Wolfe.

Sometimes it’s things that take the joy out of life, like a blowout when you’re hitting sixty or a button coming off of a shirt when you’re in a hurry, but usually it’s people.

War doesn’t mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.

There’s nothing as safe as ignorance or as dangerous.

The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person. It is mine. I am sometimes successful.

No man with any sense assumes that a woman’s words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.

What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there’s only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That’s the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that’s the only sensible way to run human affairs.

Everyone has something they don’t want anyone to see; that is one of the functions of a home, to provide a spot to keep such things.