Gomorrah Quotes
"Everything that exists passes through here. Through the port of Naples."
"The port of Naples handles 20 percent of the value of Italian textile imports from China, but more than 70 percent of the quantity."
"The ruthless swiftness of Chinese merchandise overruns the temporal dimension of customs inspections, killing time itself."
"The System brought the two together, winning out all around."
"When work is only about staying afloat, surviving, when it’s merely an end in itself, it becomes the worst kind of loneliness."
"The air of the city smells like war, you can breathe it through every pore; it has the rancid odor of sweat."
"The economy has a top and a bottom. We got in at the bottom and we’re coming out on top."
"Everything is just as it should be. Here there’s only a body, a skill, a machine, and a salary."
"The fact is that the only thing you learn here is how to die."
"The clans no longer need to organize in large bodies. These days a group of people can decide to band together, rob, smash store windows, and steal without risking being killed or taken over by the clan."
"In order to understand how prosperous the drug trade is, consider that a thousand lire invested in drugs on the first of September become a hundred million by the first of August of the following year."
"No one chooses his own nickname; it emerges suddenly out of somewhere, for some reason, and someone picks up on it."
"Camorra nicknames are determined by destiny."
"A well-calibrated nickname, such as Francesco Schiavone’s famous, ferocious Sandokan, can make or break the media fortune of a boss."
"The Di Lauro business model has always reminded me of the mathematical concept of fractals."
"The market doesn’t make concessions for the appreciation of human assets."
"Every bond, be it affection, law, rights, love, emotion, or religion, is a concession to the competition, a stumbling block to success."
"Total and absolute liberalism. Let the market regulate itself."
"An area where dozens of clans are operating, with profit levels comparable only to a maneuver in high finance—where a single family can turn over 300 million euros annually—cannot be a ghetto."
"In war you can’t let your gaze be distracted."
"In a war that is not officially declared, not recognized by governments, and not recorded by reporters, the fear also goes unspoken."
"The most complicated thing was to understand."
"Getting hit in the head saves you from trembling in fear, pissing your pants, or having the stench of your guts ooze out of the holes in your stomach."
"Killing a human being became the equivalent of manufacturing something, it didn’t matter what. A piece."
"The only way to anesthetize every fear is to show how the guns can be neutralized."
"Ethics are the limit of the loser, the protection of the defeated."
"Justice is something else, an abstract principle that involves everyone."
"To win in the market arena, to stare at the sun, challenging it from his prison cell."
"I want to die like a man, like someone who truly commands. I want to be killed."
"The Camorra has killed more than the Sicilian Mafia, more than the ‘Ndrangheta."
"Everything comes to an end. Everything gets covered over."
"To understand the business of the Camorra, you don’t need to count the dead."
"In Secondigliano this new structure of boys was militarized."
"Media coverage is only concerned with the aesthetics of the Neapolitan slums."
"After a Camorra war there are no ruins of buildings, and the sawdust soon soaks up the blood."
"Only the women showed their faces in the town; not only were they the behind-the-scenes administrators and brains of the operation, but they also became the official symbol of the families, the faces and eyes of power."
"The Cavas started to shoot, but the Grazianos braked hard, as if they’d been expecting them."
"Women are better able to confront crime as if it were only momentary, or someone’s opinion, or a step one takes before quickly moving on."
"If the state figure stonewalled us, we would find someone else who was willing to help us."
"I did not invent that weapon to make money, but only and exclusively to defend the Motherland in a moment in which she needed it."
"The best way to hide weapons is to keep them in barracks."
"The face of supreme Camorra strength is increasingly female, but so are those crushed by the tanks of power."
"It seemed more like a trial of history, the Nuremberg for a whole generation of the Camorra."
"The only sound in the courtroom was the lawyers’ voices."
"Twenty-one life sentences, more than 750 years of prison."
"The courtroom emptied immediately, the police and carabinieri slowly dispersing."
"It’s strange, but I didn’t have the feeling that the Casalesi clan had been defeated."
"The bosses always pay—they can’t do otherwise."
"Criminality is not power pure and simple, but one kind of power."
"The faces that were printed the next day in the newspapers... did not represent an infernal circle of criminals but pieces of a mosaic of power."
"Senator Lorenzo Diana was their favorite target."
"The economic power of the Camorra System lies exactly in its continual turnover of leaders and criminal choices."
"The truth of the word takes no prisoners because it devours everything and turns everything into evidence."
"The proofs are irrefutable because they are partial, recorded with my eyes, recounted with words, and tempered with emotions."
"The constitution should be amended to say that it is founded on cement."
"Every time I see the lists of assets the DDA has confiscated from the bosses, I feel depressed and exhausted; everywhere I turn, everything seems to be theirs."
"As I wandered through those blackened rooms, I felt my chest swell, as if my insides had become one giant heart."
"All I have in this world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break them for no one, you understand?"
"Movies are the source for forms of expression."
"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men."
"In art I am free, I don’t need to be released from prison."
"The only solution ever proposed is incineration."
"I walked through lands devoured by dioxins, dumped on by trucks, and so gutted by fire that the holes would never completely be erased."