Important Quotations Explained
1. “Seldom
have I undertaken the smallest job without giving my friend Brown
here a share of the proceeds. . . . And seldom has the all-powerful
Sheriff . . . organized a raid without previously giving a little
tip-off to me, the friend of his youth.”
2. “Some
read the Bible; others take a Law Degree / Some join the Church
and some attack the State / While some remove the celery from their
plate / And then devise a theory. / By evening all are busy moralizing
/ But when the night is falling, they are rising.”
3. “You may
proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy / But till you feed us,
right and wrong can wait! / Or is it only those who have the money
/ Can enter in the land of milk and honey?”
4. “And I
did work out something: the rich of the earth indeed create misery,
but they cannot bear to see it. They are weaklings and fools just
like you. As long as they have enough to eat and can grease their
floors with butter so that even the crumbs that fall from their
tables grow fat, they can't look with indifference on a man collapsing
from hunger—although, of course, it must be in front of their house
that he collapses.”
5. “We bourgeois
artisans, who work with honest jimmies on the cash boxes of small
shopkeepers, are being swallowed up by large concerns backed by
banks.”
