“By birth, certainly, they were not prepared in any way to achieve their desires. They were not the smartest kids in the neighborhood. They were not born the richest. They weren’t even the toughest. In fact, they lacked almost all the necessary talents that might have helped them satisfy the appetites of their dreams, except one—their talent for violence.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, quote from Wiseguy
“On one occasion Jimmy is said to have given the elderly, impoverished mother of a young hood five thousand dollars. The woman’s son was said to have owed his mother the money but had refused to pay her. Jimmy was apparently so incensed at this lack of regard for motherhood that he gave the woman the five thousand in the morning, claiming it was from her son, and then allegedly killed the woman’s son before dusk.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, quote from Wiseguy
“Henry was never able to help McDonald crack Lufthansa—the”
― Nicholas Pileggi, quote from Wiseguy
“Of course, no matter how Henry tried to rationalize what he had done, his survival depended upon his capacity for betrayal. He willingly turned on the world he knew and the men with whom he had been raised with the same nonchalance he had used in setting up a bookie joint or slipping a tail. For Henry Hill giving up the life was hard, but giving up his friends was easy.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, quote from Wiseguy
“The federal prosecutors were asking him about his role in the $6 million Lufthansa German Airlines robbery, the largest successful cash robbery in American history.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, quote from Wiseguy
“I had a drugstore wholesaler who had discount stores all over Long Island.”
― Nicholas Pileggi, quote from Wiseguy
Nicholas Pileggi
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date February 22, 1933
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“Maybe I don't like people as much as the rest of the world seems to. Seems like the human race is in love with itself. What kind of ego do you have to have to think that you were created in God's image? I mean, to invent the idea that God must be like us. Please. As Stanley Kubrick once pointed out, the discovery of more intelligent life somewhere other than Earth would be catastrophic to man, simply because we would no longer be able to think of ourselves as the centre of the universe. I guess I'm slowly becoming one of those crusty old cranks that thinks animals are better than people. But, occasionally, people will pleasantly surprise me and I'll fall in love with one of them, so go figure.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“What we did see was that jealousy is fear: it can corrode even if quite baseless.”
― Sheldon Vanauken, quote from A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy and Triumph
“The rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely ‘rewarding lawbreakers.’
For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime.”
― Michelle Alexander, quote from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
“And the girl,' Lanser continued, 'the girl, Lieutenant, you may rape her, or protect her, or marry her--that is of no importance so long as you shoot her when it is ordered.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Moon Is Down
“We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.”
― Randy Alcorn, quote from Courageous
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Harbour
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Sweet Sleep
Story Engineering: C...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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