Quotes from Steve Martini

But circumstances make victims of us all at times.

The reality was that in America the truly rich had regiments of lawyers and accountants with numberless schemes to avoid taxes.

with aides while he wrote his memoirs, Mein Kampf, meaning 'My Struggle,' in which he gave the world's leader fair warning about what was to come. Of course, they didn't listen to him. They never do. "When Hitler got out of Landsberg, there was a gift waiting for him. One of his followers had managed to find their flag, blood and all. They presented it to Hitler as a memento of the Beer Hall Putsch, the incident that brought him to national prominence. To

Guns were out and butter was in, enough to grease the welfare skids and

It took ten years before they discovered half the world was crazy and some of the people in the asylum were fashioning nuclear weapons.

Democracy was expendable. Money could still be made. China needed capital from the West to fuel its modernization on the mainland.

It was Jefferson who warned that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." There

Good-paying jobs were shipped to Mexico or Asia where they could be downgraded to sweatshop wages while the president made empty gestures about job training and touted the benefits of the global economy. It didn't matter whether they were Republicans or Democrats, they all sang the same song.

The problem most people have with resisting temptation is that they never really want to discourage it altogether.

He lied with a smile that paralyzed reason." [Abby Chandlis - main character of The List]

We live in a time where increasingly our national leaders are more like dons of crime than statesmen, where notions of plausible deniability replace truth, and claims that politicians never knew of evil done in their own names by others are commonplace. It is the age of unbridled arrogance and video showmanship, where the challenge ' prove what I knew and when I knew it ' has become a national motto.

What Harry means is, he has a taste for "felonious voyeurism." It happens. Lawyers, judges, cops, and jurors all find themselves titillated from time to time by the stories of violence, drugs, and sex. The criminal side of the law provides a window on the dark side of life that exists nowhere else.

In this country, a federal grand jury probe is the closest thing to Courts of Inquisition or a Star Chamber that exists. There are few rights, nothing that comes close to cross-examination, and no right to counsel inside the jury room. There are no real rules of evidence. The only thing they can't do is torture you, and on that you must take the government's word.

He is a perfect politician: glib, superficial, manipulative; a great sense of self and a natural talent for a profession for which lying is usually listed at the top of the job decription. In short, the clinical definition of your average sociopath.

law to exclude Mr. Rath, it can exercise its

What made him mad was the constant drumming on CNN, telling everybody that the economy was just fine. The news media, or whatever they were calling themselves these days, had become nothing but a mouthpiece for the federal government, parroting press releases from the White House. If the president took a crap in public, they'd report that he shit gold bricks. If

I had to pick one, I'd say it was that Ed Pack was a stand-up guy and a good father.

They had lost all sense of the art, always to provide one's prince with the refuge of credible deniability, what the British called a scintilla of truth.

He wondered if American jails were better than those in Russia. He

he was, sitting in a comfortable car, sweating blood because the man was ten minutes late. He

Nick, putting you on any committee would be an act of anarchy. The only administrative position for which you're qualified is emperor, and that would only work in hell and then only if there were bars on the windows.

what was happening just in time to watch the flaming pickup truck start on its fiery trek down the hill. Fuel spilling from the vehicle's gas tank left a blazing track behind it on the bare earth as the truck streaked down the steep firebreak on the side of the hill. It

the Eagle, had compromised and as a consequence owned nearly a third of the key positions in the House and almost as many in the Senate.

With books as with most things in life, when you're successful, it's always good to have a second act.