Sergio Mattarella Quotes

Mafia states integrate the speed and flexibility of transnational criminal networks with the legal protections and diplomatic privileges enjoyed only by states.

Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.

A small-time hoodlum who had spent most of the 1960s at San Quentin State Prison in California, the 30-year-old Bryant claimed that he hijacked Flight 97 under orders from his higher-ups in the Black Panther Party; he said his mission was to arrange for the purchase of bazookas to aid the organization's struggle against oppression.

Everybody keeps saying that India's a poor country. Yes, we have poverty. But I blame the government of India, the political establishment, for their failure to educate and therefore their failure to control the poverty.

There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

I would not apply the strategy of Calderon. I would look at the causes. Violence in Mexico has its origins in the lack of development and corruption.

Without economic development, any potential for political openness and freedom will be questionable.

The big thieves hang the little ones.

… the sole end of government is the protection and security of the people; whenever therefore that power which was originally instituted to effect these important and valuable purposes is employed to harass and enslave the people, … it becomes a curse rather than a blessing.

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce and the diffusion of education, then upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.

Our time has come in this country to go to prison. We'll go to prison, we'll die, but tomorrow our children must be free.

The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united.

A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men, no great thing can really be accomplished.

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

The government is so brave that it dares to arrest, capture and punish Muslim leaders and activists. But officials do not have the courage to capture those engaged in corruption or the gambling mafia, who, destroy the country's moral structure

Wars are bred by poverty and oppression. Continued peace is possible only in a relatively free and prosperous world.

Problems in our country haven't been caused by Donald Trump, America and its ambitions or CIA spies. Our problems are rooted in a bad government system, the lack of free elections, independent courts and freedom of speech.

We all want prosperity, but not at the expense of liberty. Poverty is not as great a danger to liberty as is wealth, with its corrupting, demoralizing influences. Let us never have a Government at Washington owing its retention to the power of the millionaires rather than to the will of millions.

The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.

In Venezuela, we either accept domination, total oppression and torture... from Maduro's regime, or we choose freedom, democracy, and prosperity for our people.

With what moral authority can they speak of human rights - the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this - the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings.

In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse.

When you get to political machines that can control a state, then you're really into organized crime - almost. You're fighting a political mafia.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.