Steve Miller Quotes

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

Every link in the chain that runs from the corporation desiring political favors down to the policeman on the beat levying his toll on the prostitute or the apple-seller is too strong to have been broken yet.

The period of Prohibition … brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police.

I was 14 when the Democratic convention in my hometown of Chicago erupted into violence. It was a tough year.

I thought the 60s in London was normal, so when it stopped it was a shock.

The police had a practice of entrapping people. This was done all over the country, but we had a particularly vicious group here in Southern California because of the Hollywood situation. They knew they could get a lot of them. They were shaking down people for thousands in blackmail.

[Milwaukee in 1912] was in the grasp of the sinister and slimy hand of special interests, dive-keepers, crooked contractors, petty racketeers, and political bosses. The city was then as graft-ridden as any other.

This don't go here. [A major riot ensued.]

It did not take me long to discover that Al Capone ran the city. His hand reached into every department of the city and county government.

… an organized system of blackguardism.

The fires of discord are busy in every city. Redress is sought in the street, in demonstrations, parades and protests which create tensions and threaten violence. We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people.

Disruption of the New Left

Once the state becomes the ultimate beneficiary of crime proceeds, how different is it, really, from being simply the most powerful gang in a battlefield of gangs?

The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

It’s a giant criminal enterprise, but at least it’s a state.

The investigators were repeatedly told not by sensation mongers but by observers of high position and ability, long experience and unquestioned disinterestedness that the courts know that some of the prosecutors are crooked and the prosecutors know that some of the courts are crooked, and both know that some of the police are crooked, and the police are equally well informed as to them. If a policeman or detective who has worked hard and effectively to land a bad criminal in jail sees him get off through improper influences, he will tend to be less zealous in the next prosecution. He will be inclined to take the easiest course and merely try to get a confession without a too nice regard for the means employed.

ONLY DANGER SAN FRANCISCO STRIKE IS THAT MAYOR IS BADLY FRIGHTENED AND HIS FEAR INFECTED ENTIRE CITY

The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone.

I've always wanted to make a film about the Tong Wars, the rioting and the crime factions in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early part of the last century.

A lot of these types of films - the vigilante or revenge drama - were so popular in the '70s because there was a feeling in the culture of loss of control.

Police work in major cities - and New York is no exception - has always been vulnerable to corruption. Teddy Roosevelt built his career on it.

The first time that I went to the United States was in 1974. I was 20 years old. America was in crisis.

It was impossible to operate in the aluminium business without krysha - very real physical protection.

Lyndon Johnson, his 44-state landslide in 1964 and Great Society notwithstanding, was by 1968 a failed president being repudiated in the primaries of his own party.

Back then, in 1968, everything was suspect - family, government, and obviously the family unit in 'Night of the Living Dead' completely collapses. That's what we were focused on.