David Mamet Quotes

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

I'm Dan Gelber. As a federal prosecutor, I helped put away corporate criminals, corrupt politicians and violent gangs.

It's about time law enforcement got as organized as organized crime.

We do not fear you [the Mafia] any more. We will root you out from under every rock, from the dark places where you hide.

Every time a boy falls off a tricycle, every time a black cat has gray kittens, every time someone stubs a toe, every time there's a murder or a fire or the marines land in Nicaragua, the police and the newspapers holler 'get Capone.'

The Chicago mobs... They practiced their own perverted form of "survival of the fittest." Where the strong clawed their way to the top of a criminal empire. And the weak died in a hail of machine gun bullets.

Under President (George W.) Bush, prosecution of gun crimes was 30 percent higher than it is under President Obama.

The media insist that crime is the major concern of the American public today. In this connection they generally push the point that a disarmed society would be a crime-free society. They will not accept the truth that if you take all the guns off the street you still will have a crime problem, whereas if you take the criminals off the street you cannot have a gun problem.

If you want to know what to do with a thief that you may find stealing, I say kill him on the spot, and never suffer him to commit another iniquity. That is what I expect I shall do, though never, in the days of my life, have I hurt a man with the palm of my hand. I never have hurt any person any other way except with this unruly member, my tongue. Notwithstanding this, if I caught a man stealing on my premises I should be very apt to send him straight home, and that is what I wish every man to do, to put a stop to that abominable practice in the midst of this people. I know this appears hard, and throws a cold chill over our revered traditions received by early education. I had a great many such feelings to contend with myself, and was as much of a sectarian in my notions as any other man, and as mild, perhaps, in my natural disposition, but I have trained myself to measure things by the line of justice, to estimate them by the rule of equity and truth, and not by the false tradition of the fathers, or the sympathies of the natural mind. If you will cause all those whom you know to be thieves, to be placed in a line before the mouth of one of our largest cannon, well loaded with chain shot, I will prove by my works whether I can mete out justice to such persons, or not. I would consider it just as much my duty to do that, as to baptize a man for the remission of his sins. That is a short discourse on thieves, I acknowledge, but I tell you the truth as it is in my heart.

I was 32 years old, and I've changed my mind. And the biggest reason that I changed my mind was my seven years as a federal prosecutor. What I learned in those seven years was that we were spending too much time talking about gun laws against law- abiding citizens and not nearly enough time talking about enforcing the gun laws strongly against criminals.

The answer to crime is not gun control, it is law enforcement and self-control.

Every country has criminals who have to be fought. They can exist anywhere, including the government or the army - or outside the government and army.

Because you won't get gun control by disarming law abiding citizens. There's only one way to get real gun control: Disarm the thugs and the criminals, lock them up, and if you don't actually throw away the key, at least lose it for a long time.

The people who steal cars, there's somebody there who is the master, who orders the cars, or just takes a car when it is brought? I am saying the law enforcement authorities have a pretty good idea about a lot of these kind of persons. We want it to pool all that knowledge and all those resources, so that they focus on these people.

Okay, first thing tomorrow we hit the streets around Taccone's place. Somebody saw something.' 'I got it covered.' 'The DiMarcos might be in town.' 'Actually, they're in jail.' 'All seven of them?' Hale shrugged. 'It was an interesting October.

I had gone to jail, but I wasn't gettin' locked up for drugs then. I was gettin' locked up for guns. My moms kept finding guns and stuff in my room and she was gettin' more scared.

We're going to be working in a stringent way and very good way on crime.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.

While I live, every criminal must die.

When you have 4,000 people killed in Chicago by guns, from the beginning of the presidency of Barack Obama, his hometown, you have to have stop-and-frisk.

I want to say 'I Shot The Police' but the government would have made a fuss so I said 'I Shot The Sheriff' insteadbut it's the same idea: justice.

You know what the [Barack] Obama administration keeps getting wrong is whenever anything bad happens they focus on law-abiding citizens instead of focusing on the bad guys.

At one time my only wish was to be a police official. It seemed to me to be an occupation for my sleepless intriguing mind. I had the idea that there, among criminals, were people to fight: clever, vigorous, crafty fellows. Later I realized that it was good that I did not become one, for most police cases involve misery and wretchedness-not crimes and scandals.

Here's a summary for the time or attention challenged: Never surrender freedom for laws that can't affect criminals; they disobey laws for a living.

Gun laws are an attempt to nationalize the right of self-defense. Politicians perennially react to the police's abject failure to prevent crime by trying to disarm law-abiding citizens. The worse government fails to control crime, the more the politicians want to restrict individuals' rights to defend themselves. But police protection in most places is typical government work - slow, inefficient, and unreliable.