Life & Wisdom Quote by Dashiell Hammett

A polite thank-you sharpened into a shiv: Hammett’s line reads like civility wearing brass knuckles. “Thanks for the information” signals deference, the kind you offer a lecturer or a busybody, but the tag that follows - “about what we call business” - slides the floor out from under the conversation. Not business as an objective category, but “what we call” business: a euphemism, a social alibi, a shared lie that lets ugly behavior pass as professionalism.

Hammett, the ex-Pinkerton who helped invent hardboiled fiction, loved this move: take the language of respectability and expose it as a costume. The intent isn’t to learn; it’s to puncture. The speaker implies the other person has just delivered a moral sermon disguised as practical advice, a little masterclass in how the world “really works.” Hammett’s response accepts the lesson only to mark it as suspect - as if to say, I’m hearing you, and I’m also hearing the racket behind the rhetoric.

The subtext is classically noir: business isn’t commerce, it’s leverage. It’s what men with clean hands call the dirty work they outsource, the bribes they rename, the violence they invoice. In a Hammett universe, information is never neutral; it’s ammunition. So the line doubles as a warning: you’ve revealed your operating principles, and now you can be read.

It’s also a tiny act of resistance. By insisting on the phrase “what we call,” the speaker keeps moral agency alive in a world that wants to declare everything inevitable.