Top 250 Ben Aaronovitch Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What do you think you’re doing?”

— Ben Aaronovitch

2. “In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

3. “Aut viam inveniam aut faciam,’ I said which means, ‘I’ll either find a way or make one.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

4. “Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

5. “The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn’t set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

6. “The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

7. “The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

8. “Science doesn’t have all the answers, you know.” “It’s got all the best questions, though,” I said.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

9. “Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

10. “Keep breathing,’ I said. ‘It’s a habit you don’t want to break.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

11. “Round and round and round we go and where we stop nobody knows.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

12. “As Conan the Barbarian famously said, “That which does not kill us does not kill us.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

13. “The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with and ology tacked on the end.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

14. “In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

15. “If there was ever a candidate to be patron saint of computers then it would be Alan Turing. Mathematician, war hero and tragic victim of homophobia.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

16. “Step Two: don’t panic. When Nightingale was training me he said that if you’re not dead in the first instance, then your chances of survival are much improved. ‘By how much?’ I’d asked. ‘That depends,’ said Nightingale. ‘On what?’ ‘On what happens next,’ he said.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

17. “It was a good plan, and like all plans since the dawn of time, this would fail to survive contact with real life.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

18. “The bouncer scrutinized my face. “Do I know you?” he asked. No, I thought, but you might remember me from such Saturday-night hits as “Would you please put that punter down I’d like to arrest him,” “You can stop kicking him now, the ambulance has arrived,” and the classic “If you don’t back off right now I’m going to nick you as well.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

19. “But as the wise man said, life’s too short to drink bad wine. Regret is a terrible vintage.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

20. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “a good song” in your music. – Siri.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

21. “The laws of thermodynamics were very clear on the subject – all debts must be paid in full.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

22. “It’s not the book that’s important,’ I said. ‘It’s the reading.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

23. “The voice belonged to a plump, round-faced woman of the sort that develops a good personality because the alternative is suicide.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

24. “When the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, the British, in time-honoured fashion, abandoned their allies. Who were subsequently wiped out by the Americans along with any other tribes that happened to be in the same general vicinity – even those that had actually been allied with the US government during the war. It’s exactly this sort of thing, of course, which gives colonialism a bad name.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

25. “The first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

26. “My dad once told me that the secret to a happy life was never to start something with a girl unless you were willing to follow wherever it led. It’s the best piece of advice he has ever given me, and probably the reason I was born.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

27. “I suspected Molly wanted the pictures to send to her friends on Twitter and Facebook, the ones that I was not supposed to know about. I didn’t dare ask because we have an unspoken agreement – I don’t question what she does on my computer when I’m out and, in return, she doesn’t murder me in my sleep. Back.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

28. “He said it was wife’s idea to name their daughter after him but I didn’t believe him. Could have been worse, I decided. It could have been Nigella.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

29. “Like a lot of London, Richmond town centre had been laid out back when town planning was something that happened to other people.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

30. “For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

31. “Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

32. “People don’t like to speak ill of the dead even when they’re monsters, let alone when they’re loved ones. People like to forget any bad things that someone did and why should they remember?”

— Ben Aaronovitch

33. “Peter Grant,’ I said. ‘Recent arrival, slacker and man of very little fame.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

34. “It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

35. “Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I’m not a country person. I don’t like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

36. “Sinister is Latin for ‘left’, making it the sort of enjoyable schoolboy pun that is such an advert for mixed-gender education.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

37. “Never diss somebody’s mum, never play chess with the Kurdish mafia, and never lie down with a woman who’s more magical than you are. I.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

38. “The night may be dark and full of terrors, I thought, but I’ve got a big stick.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

39. “Cicero wouldn’t approve of my writing style, but at least I pronounce his name with a hard C.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

40. “Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It’s not your garden, it’s not a park – it’s a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer’s plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

41. “I’d found a seventeenth-century map of the rivers of London.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

42. “There’s always a secret door,” I said. “That’s why you always need a thief in your party.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

43. “My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become a Londoner.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

44. “John Radcliffe, Royal physician to William and Mary, was famous in his own time for reading very little and writing almost nothing. So it stands to reason that one of the most famous libraries in Oxford was his creation.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

45. “Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

46. “A romantic,” said Nightingale much, much later. “The most dangerous people on Earth.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

47. “Missing kids are tough cases. I mean, murder is bad but at least the worst has already happened to the victim – they’re not going to get any deader. Missing kids come with a literal deadline, made worse by the fact that you don’t get to learn the timing until it’s too late.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

48. “This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there’s someone else to do the housework.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

49. “One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

50. “On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.”

— Ben Aaronovitch