Gangsters Quotes - Page 8

• If it wasn't for hustlers, gangsters & gamblers there'd be no Jazz. Wasn't middle~class who said Let's go hear Bird tonight.

  Betty Carter

  Music, Bird, Tonight

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• The British are the last national group who can be insulted by Hollywood without any comeback. These days if you depict Italians as gangsters, Saudis as terrorists or Mexicans as violent drug dealers you'll never hear the end of it. But as still the largest - and possibly the richest - ethnic group in the States, the British just have to take it.

  Simon Hoggart

  Drug, Hollywood, Groups

  "What do men guilty of 'inappropriate behaviour' think they will get from it?" by Simon Hoggart, www.theguardian.com. March 1, 2013.

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• He was the class clown, the court jester, because he'd learn early that if you cracked jokes and pretended you weren't scared, you usually didn't get beat up. Even the baddest gangster kids would tolerate you, keep you around for laughs. Plus, humor was a good way to hide the pain

  Rick Riordan

  Pain, Kids, Class

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• In the case of drama (stage, movies, television ), there appear to be people in almost every audience who never quite fully realize that a play is a set of fictional, symbolic representations. An actor is one who symbolizes other people, real or imagined. [...] Also some years ago it was reported that when Edward G. Robinson, who used to play gangster roles with extraordinary vividness, visited Chicago, local hoodlums would telephone him at his hotel to pay their professional respects.

  S. I. Hayakawa

  Real, Drama, Years

  "Language in Thought and Action". Book by S. I. Hayakawa (p.27-28), 1991.

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• I play a lot of hard men and gangsters, and I’m not like that at all.

  Sean Pertwee

  Men, Play, Hard

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• I think the part of media that romanticizes criminal behavior, things that a person will say against women, profanity, being gangster, having multiple children with multiple men and women and not wanting to is prevalent. When you look at the majority of shows on television they placate that kind of behavior.

  Bill Cosby

  Children, Men, Thinking

  "Q&A: Bill Cosby Talks Family, Faith and Tim Tebow". Interview with Mark Hensch, www.christianpost.com. December 15, 2011.

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• I was always raised on cowboy films, and then when I could start making choices about the movies I wanted to watch I found myself wanting to watch gangster films which were slightly more sophisticated than the baseline stuff that was in westerns.

  Shia LaBeouf

  Cowboy, Choices, Watches

  "Shia LaBeouf says he scared 'Lawless' co-star Mia Wasikowska so much, she almost left the film". Interview with Hollie McKay, www.foxnews.com. August 28, 2012.

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• I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

  Smedley Butler

  Wall, Marine, Men

  "War Is a Racket". Smedley Butler's speech in the U.S. (1933); later published as a book "War Is a Racket", www.businessinsider.com. 1935.

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• I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters.

  Martin Scorsese

  Italian, Numbers, Pieces

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• But alas, the most terrifying aspect of the whole fascist episode is the dark fact that most of its poisons are generated not by evil men or evil peoples, but by quite ordinary men in search of an answer to the baffling problems that beset every society.

  John T. Flynn

  Dark, Men, Evil

  "As We Go Marching".

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• It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

  C. L. R. James

  People, Deception, Sacred

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• The experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans. There is almost nothing we understand better or react to more readily or with quicker intelligence. In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects Americanism itself.

  Robert Warshow

  Art, Quality, Way

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• It ought to have gangsters, and aeroplanes and a lot of automatic pistols.

  John Masefield

  Pistols, Ought, Aeroplanes

  John Masefield (2011). “The Box of Delights”, p.20, Egmont UK

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• All eyes, all attention at the federal level, are on al Qaeda and the war on terror. Fact is, al Qaeda wouldn't last a day in parts of Philadelphia. I've got gangsters with .45s that would run them out of town.

  Michael Nutter

  Running, War, Eye

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• I like the days when all the filmmakers had was a film roll, a camera and a gangster. The Mack Sennett comedies were all like that. They'd create little teams to go out and shoot films.

  Michel Gondry

  Team, Cameras, Littles

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• I never was that boy who loved gangster films, but when I was growing up, I was obsessed with the detective Dick Tracy. It was one of my favourite movies as a kid, and he really inspired me. I would have loved to be part of that golden age of Hollywood in the 1940s. It made me want to become an actor.

  Ryan Gosling

  Growing Up, Kids, Boys

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• I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Fall, Men, Gym Rats

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder”, p.245, Random House

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• If Dr. Mahathir thinks that by ordering the police to act like gangsters he will frighten the people from supporting this reformation movement, he is dreaming. I think he has cut himself off from reality.

  Wan Azizah Wan Ismail

  Dream, Cutting, Reality

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• My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.

  William S. Burroughs

  Past, Viruses, Half

  William S. Burroughs (2013). “The Adding Machine”, p.59, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Pop music is great, but there's a lot of BS about the attitude of guys being super-gangster - that's why the whole thing is silly. It's making fun of itself. That self-awareness is why people enjoy it. It's refreshing.

  Emily Ratajkowski

  Fun, Attitude, Silly

  "Q&A: Emily Ratajkowski on 'Blurred Lines' and Her Song of the Summer". Interview with Mike Ayers, www.esquire.com. July 22, 2013.

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• I think people like listening to what I call trippy music but maybe next year it will be something else. I still have gangster tracks and real-life stories and situations in my music. I’ve been blessed because over 20 year, I never stopped doing what I was doing. It’s pretty much the same thing and I’ve never really changed anything up.

  Juicy J

  Real, Blessed, Thinking

  Source: www.sfstation.com

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• The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."

  Jess Row

  Rap, Ice, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Misrepresentation, false propaganda, innuendoes soon sprout into poisonous weeds, and before long the people find themselves victims of a pollution that has robbed them of their individual liberty and enslaved them to a group of political gangsters.

  David O. McKay

  Weed, Long, People

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• I've been acting a long time, and I can play a Cockney gangster or a womanizer in my sleep or standing on my head. But what I try to do is I try to find characters that are as far away from me as I possibly can and then make them real. A French Nazi is about as far away from me as I can possibly get without actually going to Mars or something.

  Michael Caine

  Real, Character, Sleep

  "Profile and Interview: Michael Caine". Interview with Erika Hernandez, www.aboutfilm.com. January, 2004.

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• The United States has entered the ranks of the failed states. One of the most remarkable manifestations of a failed state is that the criminals are all inside the government operating against the people, whereas in a normal state, the criminals are on the outside of the government, operating against it. So, we now have every manifestation of being a failed state, with the government in the hands of a few Wall Street gangsters.

  Paul Craig Roberts

  Wall, Government, Hands

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