Rich Cohen > Quotes

“Show me a happy man and I will show you a man who is getting nothing accomplished in this world.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“a man can free his soul only by exhausting his body.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“The way the kids of immigrants heard about America, you would think it was not down the stairs and out the door but still across the ocean, a distant place where everything is promised and, for hard work, everything is given. From the day he left his parents' house, Abe [Reles] had to know his father was right, that America promises everything, but he also had to know his father was wrong--America gives nothing. Those things that are promised, they cannot be worked for but must be taken, conned away with good looks, obsequiousness, mimicry; or traded for with bit of your soul or the morals of the stories your parents told; or tricked away with lies; or wrested away with brute force.”
― Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams

“(The world is a mere succession of fortunes made and lost, lessons learned and forgotten and learned again.)”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“What cannot be accomplished by threats can often be achieved by composure. Sit and stare and let your opponent fill the silence with his own demons.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“Maybe [Abe] Reles even thought, What goes around comes around! Probably not. For this suggests there is a finite amount of shit, and every gangster knows the amount of shit is infinite. It also suggests a degree of cause and effect, and every gangster knows the shit you give and the shit you take are only sometimes connected. And this is one source of the gangster’s power: a freedom the rest of suspicious, God-fearing America will never have access to. Gangsters know that even if they stop doing bad things, which they so enjoy doing, bad things will still happen to them. So why not go ahead and break shit before you yourself are broken?”
― Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams

“What’s football?” he asked. “It’s chess. Tackle chess. And what’s the quarterback? He’s the king. Take him out, you win the game. So that was our philosophy. We’re going to hit that quarterback ten times. We do that, he’s gone. I hit him late? Fine. Penalize me. But it’s like in those courtroom movies, when the lawyer says the wrong thing and the judge tells the jury to disregard it, but you can’t unhear and the quarterback can’t be unhit.”
― Rich Cohen, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

“It was not these policies alone that turned things around; it was also the energy behind the policies: the six-week tour, the firing and hiring, the tough decisions made about the fleet and the fields. A light was burning in the pilothouse, a firm hand had taken hold of the tiller. United Fruit’s stock price stabilized, then began to climb. It doubled in the first two weeks of Zemurray’s reign, reaching $26 a share by the fall of 1933. This had less to do with tangible results—it was too early for that—than the confidence of investors. If you looked in the newspaper, you would see the new head of the company landing his plane on a strip in the jungle, anchoring his boat on the north coast of Honduras, going here and there, working, working, working. In a time of crisis, the mere evidence of activity can be enough to get things moving. Though Zemurray would stay at the helm for another twenty years, United Fruit was saved in his first sixty days.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“Where you end up is the thing, not how you get there. How you get there, that’s just something to be debated by the suckers who never make it out.”
― Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams

“he wanted to win. And would do whatever it took. Here was a self-made man, filled with the most dangerous kind of confidence: he had done it before and believed he could do it again. This gave him the air of a berserker, who says, If you're going to fight me, you better kill me.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“If you want to drive the isthmus lengthwise, down the gullet, Mexico to Colombia, where the land broadens and South America begins, your best bet is the Pan-American Highway, which starts in Alaska and continues thirty thousand miles to the bottom of the world. It’s a network of roads each charted by a conquistador or strongman. It’s disappointing in many places, rutted and small, climbing and descending, battling the jungle and mountains, then ending abruptly in the rain forest of Panama. It’s as if the road itself, defeated by nature, walked away muttering. It starts again sixty-five miles hence, on the other side of a chasm. This is called the Darién Gap. It symbolizes the incomplete nature of Central America, the IN PROGRESS sign that seems to hang over everything. Russia is the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Germany is the Autobahn. The United States is Route 66. Central America is the Darién Gap.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“Guy Molony, who ran away from New Orleans at sixteen to fight in the Boer War. It was the era of romantic soldiering, when boys heeded the call of Rudyard Kipling (“Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, / Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst,” he wrote in “Mandalay”).”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned: “You okay, Bronk?” Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.” In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.”
― Rich Cohen, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

“I no longer live in Chicago. Not a day goes by when I do not wish I were there.”
― Rich Cohen, The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse

“You have to leave town to claim your life, to birth yourself, to take possession of the world. If you do not leave town, sooner or later, ten minutes from now, if not ten years hence, you wake to find you were never alive, that your town exists against a nothing background. You have to leave your town before you can claim it—this is something my father and his friends came to realize in the fifties, when it seemed the entire borough was packing up and moving off. Dead or out of town. Dead or out. Out or dead of town. Dead town out of. And of course, years later, when they did try to come back, when they stood on the corner and closed their eyes, they realized the old town was gone, had died while they were off living their lives.”
― Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams

“absolute criminality is absolute freedom.”
― Rich Cohen, The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation

“Geography is destiny.”
― Rich Cohen, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

“He was surrounded, supine in his dirty uniform, the faces staring down, the sky, the peaks—a legendary scene in the life of Lee Christmas. “Goddamned you all to Hell!” he shouted. “Shoot me now if you’ve got the guts. Shoot me you miserable heathens. Shoot me and be done with me but don’t bury me. Leave me on the ground to rot.” “Don’t bury you? But why Señor General?” Then came the words that Christmas either wrote in advance, made up afterward, or actually spoke—words that attached themselves to his story like a tagline, in the nature of “Do you feel lucky, punk?” “Because I want the buzzards to eat me, and fly over you afterward, and scatter white shit all over your God-damned black faces.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“Yes, a major can break a record or sell a hit, but it can never lead the way.”
― Rich Cohen, The Record Men: The Chess Brothers and the Birth of Rock & Roll

“There are times when certain cards sit unclaimed in the common pile, when certain properties become available that will never be available again. A good businessman feels these moments like a fall in the barometric pressure. A great businessman is dumb enough to act on them even when he cannot afford to.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“Football is an angry game, played with punishing violence," he writes. "People get destroyed on the field, lives end. It makes sense that its first star was someone who'd already lost everything, a ruined man, ill-treated, stripped to his essential qualities: speed, strength, power. Jim Thorpe is the spirit of the game. Every NFL hit still carries the fury of the disgraced Indian, prowling the field, seeking justice.”
― Rich Cohen, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

“Zemurray lived near the docks. No one could tell me the exact address. Some building in the French Quarter, perhaps a wreck with cracks in the walls and a sloped ceiling, and the heat goes out and the fog comes in. When his business grew, he moved uptown, following the wealth of the city, which had been fleeing the French Quarter for decades. At twenty-nine, he was rich, a well-known figure in a steamy paradise, tall with deep black eyes and a hawkish profile. A devotee of fads, a nut about his weight, he experimented with diets, now swearing off meat, now swearing off everything but meat, now eating only bananas, now eating everything but bananas. He spent fifteen minutes after each meal standing on his head, which he read was good for digestion. His friends were associates, his mentors and enemies the same. He was a bachelor and alone but not lonely. He was on a mission, after all, in quest of the American dream, and was circumspect and deliberate as a result. He never sent letters or took notes, preferring to speak in person or by phone. He was described as shy, but I think his actions are more accurately characterized as careful—he did not want to leave a record or draw attention.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“Show me a happy man and I will show you a man who is getting nothing accomplished in this world. Ripe”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“After all, almost everyone I know, even my very oldest friends, remain, in important ways, a mystery to me.”
― Rich Cohen, Lake Effect: A Memoir

“This is where my generation, Generation X, parts company with the baby boomers. They ruined drugs, as they ruined Frye boots and bell-bottoms. We never shared their dream of opening the doors of perception, or touching the face of God. Because of them, enlightenment seemed like bullshit. All that remained was the high. With their embarrassing enthusiasm, they turned everything into a joke. They ate the fruit and left the peel, smoked the pot and left the resin, swallowed the epiphanies and left the reality. When it was our time, they scolded us, saying it was too dangerous—you’d have to be a moron to try it. About their own youthful behavior, they’d say, We didn’t know then what we know now. By the time we came along, everything was banned, feared, and covered in protective foam, but can you imagine how much fun LSD must have been in 1964 when it was legal?”
― Rich Cohen, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

“I shook his hand and thanked him, and as I thanked him I welled up and as that happened I tried to explain. 'It’s because I’m from Chicago,' I said. 'Where in Chicago are you from?' he asked. 'Glencoe.' 'That’s not Chicago,' he said, and waved me away.”
― Rich Cohen, The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse

“According to David Maraniss, the author of When Pride Still Mattered, Lombardi’s last words, spoken in a delirium on his deathbed, were: “Joe Namath! You’re not bigger than football! Remember that!”
― Rich Cohen, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

“...the Beatles and the Stones, never the Stones and the Beatles.”
― Rich Cohen, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

“The god of the Hebrews is wrath. The god of the Christians is forgiveness. The god of rock ’n’ roll is energy. The enemy of that god is arena rock, which looks and feels like real rock but is in truth an abomination.”
― Rich Cohen, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

“Preston later spoke of Zemurray with admiration. He said the kid from Russia was closer in spirit to the banana pioneers than anyone else working. “He’s a risk taker,”4 Preston explained, “he’s a thinker, and he’s a doer.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King