Robert K. Tanenbaum > Quotes

“...language is sacred. It has glory, even in ordinary speech. The way most people use it, it's like a winged horse pulling a junk wagon.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Absolute Rage

“One of the most corrosive aspects of the criminal justice system is its toleration of the insanity defense...Legitimate in some few cases, the insanity defense has been rendered farcical through its manipulation by so-called experts.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, The Piano Teacher: The True Story of a Psychotic Killer

“Human beings are fallible, frightened and prone to corruption.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, No Lesser Plea

“but there it was. Home was prison was home.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Corruption of Blood

“They wish to make a medical thing of evil. Madness is also such a useful metaphor, for that which we would rather not face...”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, No Lesser Plea

“criminal law, a field that presented many of the same conditions and offered many of the same rewards as topflight athletics. It had the same elements of intense preparation and concentration, of confrontation in a circumscribed arena, where passion and aggression were bound by elaborate rules, of the final decision, and the emotional charge that went with it: won, lost, guilty, not guilty.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, No Lesser Plea

“residence”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Hoax

“Yeah, well, if something goes wrong, it'll give me a chance to shoot your ass and save the taxpayers a lot of money," Fulton said and looked again in the mirror. The humor was gone from Kane's face, replaced by a mask of such malevolence that the detective was suddenly re minded of one of his mother's old sayings about letting sleeping dogs lie.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Counterplay

“family, especially our mothers. But”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Tragic

“the media run everything, yeah, but they shouldn’t run the law, too.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, True Justice

“The bar was also a reminder of an age when the upper middle classes poured enormous quantities of hard liquor down their throats at every occasion in which more than two people were in a room for more than three minutes.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Reversible Error

“...this is hard to explain, but it's not a government operation, the Kennedy thing [assassination]. I've been in government my whole life, and I've seen a lot of slimy deals go down, and the one characteristic they all have is stupidity and simplicity; once you pick at them, they start to unravel. People rat each other out. They leave evidence lying around. They buy yachts they can't afford. And let's face it, you want to start a conspiracy in the government, who've you got to do the job? Guys who signed up to work at a desk eight hours a day for thirty years, with no chance of layoffs and a nice pension at the end. Not your top recruits for skullduggery, right? Prime example: Watergate. Now that's a government conspiracy.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum

“gaze. It had been a rhetorical question, and she was astounded”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Justice Denied

“It is told often proverbially: “God is not mocked,” we say, or “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, No Lesser Plea

“Karp was an innocent and he believed in justice. That made him one of the most dangerous men in the building.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, No Lesser Plea

“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out where the strong man stumbled, nor where the doer of deeds could have done them better. “On the contrary, the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena—whose vision is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up again and again; who knows the great devotions, the great enthusiasms; who at best knows in the end the triumph of his achievement. “However,”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Hoax

“Now it was as if, at a basketball game, one side would argue about whether the court or the ball was exactly the right size until the other team got pissed off and left, giving them the win on a forfeit.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, No Lesser Plea

“the onerous part of being the district attorney was putting up with an exploitative and sensationalizing media and dealing with a myriad of special-interest groups, all of whom thought they were being ignored, or discriminated against, or deserved more, and all of whom knew that they could do his job better than he could. He was also tired of watching incompetent judges and ethically challenged lawyers make a mockery of the system.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Counterplay

“Abraham Lincoln: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Counterplay

“sitting on the beach in Florida, playing”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, No Lesser Plea

“Like many men who enjoy the sound of their own voices and have the confidence attendant on a captive audience, he was not succinct.”
― Robert K. Tanenbaum, Reversible Error