“Charity is salt in the wound. It is painful. The state gives charity with the bitter hatred of a victim to his blackmailer. The receiver of free money is subjected to harassment, insult, and profound humiliation. Newspapers are enlisted to heap scorn on the arrogant bastards who choose to beg instead of starve or let their children starve. It is made clear that the poor seek charity as a great and sordid chicanery in which they delight. And there are some who do. As there are people who take delight in sticking hot needles deep into their abdomens, swallow pieces of broken bottles. A special taste. Speaking for humanity in general, the poor accept charity with a shame and loss of self-respect that is truly pitiful.”

“A man's primary duty in life is to earn his own living, but to what purpose if he did not have a wife and children?”

“A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”

“Friendship and money: oil and water.”

“Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.”

“Kurt Cilke liked dogs because they could not conspire. They could not hide hostility, and they were not cunning. They did not lie awake at night planning to rob and murder other dogs. Treachery was beyond their scope.”

“At that moment Sonny noticed that the other car had not kept going but had parked a few feet ahead, still blocking his way. At that same moment his lateral vision caught sight of another man in the darkened tollbooth to his right. But he did not have time to think about that because two men came out of the car parked in front and walked toward him. The toll collector still had not appeared. And then in the fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man. And in that moment his mind was lucid, drained of all violence, as if the hidden fear finally real and present had purified him.”

“Don had made a fewer mistakes and learned from every one of them”

“I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.”

“God seemed to be having a hard time killing him, and he'd be damned if he was going to make the job easy for mere mortals”

“Not to be rich, but to have money; to have money like a wall to put your back to, and then face the world.”