“You had to play the big scene,” he said coldly. “Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”

— Raymond Chandler, book The Long Goodbye

Source: The Long Goodbye (1954), chapter 8

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Raymond Chandler124

Novelist, screenwriter 1888–1959

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