Bryan Burrough > Quotes

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States,” notes a retired FBI agent, Max Noel. “People don’t want to listen to that. They can’t believe it. One bombing now and everyone gets excited. In 1972? It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace.”
― Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

“To the generations of Americans raised since World War 2, the identities of criminals such as Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, "Ma" Barker, John Dillenger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time. They were real.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“Recognize that ultimate success comes from opportunistic, bold moves which, by definition, cannot be planned.”
― Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

“History is written by the victors, they say, and there was no one alive who would come forward to dispute Hoover’s fabricated story. Never mind that there was no indication whatsoever in Bureau files that Ma Barker had ever fired a gun, robbed a bank, or done anything more criminal than live off her sons’ ill-gotten gains.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“The minute you establish an organization, it starts to decay.”
― Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

“Art has now done for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow something they could never achieve in life: it has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters, imbuing them with a cuddly likability they did not possess, and a cultural significance they do not deserve.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“When one looks back across a chasm of seventy years, through a prism of pulp fiction and bad gangster movies, there is a tendency to view the events of 1933-34 as mythic, as folkloric. To the generations of Americans raised since World War II, the identities of criminals such as Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, “Ma” Barker, John Dillinger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“Everyone in the room knew about leveraged buyouts, often called LBOs. In an LBO, a small group of senior executives, usually working with a Wall Street partner, proposes to buy its company from public shareholders, using massive amounts of borrowed money. Critics of this procedure called it stealing the company from its owners and fretted that the growing mountain of corporate debt was hindering America’s ability to compete abroad. Everyone knew LBOs meant deep cuts in research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrificed to pay off debt. Proponents insisted that companies forced to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: The executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich.”
― Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

“Planning, gentlemen, is ‘What are you going to do next year that’s different from what you did this year?’” he told them. “All I want is five items.”
― Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

“an odd-job detective agency with fuzzy lines of authority and responsibility.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“He who’s not busy being born is busy dying.” Tony”
― Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

“radical violence was so deeply woven into the fabric of 1970s America that many citizens, especially in New York and other hard-hit cities, accepted it as part of daily life. As one New Yorker sniffed to the New York Post after an FALN attack in 1977, “Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?”
― Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

“as hard as it may be to comprehend today, there was a moment during the early 1970s when bombings were viewed by many Americans as a semilegitimate means of protest. In the minds of others, they amounted to little more than a public nuisance.”
― Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

“Let us pause for a moment to consider the irony of a Mexican government determined to stop the flow of illegal American immigrants. You just have to relish it. The only thing missing is a Mexican president promising to build a wall.”
― Bryan Burrough, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth

“pause for a moment to consider the irony of a Mexican government determined to stop the flow of illegal American immigrants. You just have to relish it. The only thing missing is a Mexican president promising to build a wall.”
― Bryan Burrough, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth

“By mid-summer only Ma Barker remained in Chicago, lost in her jigsaw puzzles. Karpis drove over to visit her one weekend and found she was doing surprisingly well. He and Dock took her to see a movie. To their horror, the film was preceded by a newsreel warning moviegoers to be on the lookout for Dillinger, Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Karpis, and the Barkers. Karpis scrunched low in his seat as their pictures flashed on the screen. “One of these men may be sitting next to you,” the announcer said. Karpis pulled his hat low over his forehead.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“Hoover viewed the Dillinger case as a potential quagmire and long resisted being drawn into it.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“Clarence Hurt was driving, and he got lost. “Does anyone know where the Post Office Building is?” Hurt asked at one point.

“I can tell you,” Karpis said.

“How do you know where it is?” asked Clyde Tolson, who sat in the backseat with Hoover.

“We were thinking of robbing it,” Karpis said.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“From the beginning, the prospect of American settlements in Texas was entirely dependent on slavery. It was no secret. Everyone knew it. Austin would say it over and over and over: The only reason Americans would come to Texas was to farm cotton, and they would not do that without slaves. They really didn’t know any other way.”
― Bryan Burrough, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth

“The first recorded U.S. bank robbery, actually a nighttime burglary, came in 1831, when a man named Edward Smith snuck into a Wall Street bank and made off with $245,000. He was caught and sentenced to a five-year term in Sing Sing.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“It is important to remember that, as Ken Auletta wrote in his definitive Greed and Glory on Wall Street, “no reporter can with 100 percent accuracy re-create events that occurred some time before. Memories play tricks on participants, the more so when the outcome has become clear. A reporter tries to guard against inaccuracies by checking with a variety of sources, but it is useful for a reader—and an author—to be humbled by this journalistic limitation.”
― Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

“Through all the machismo, through all the greed, through all the discussion of shareholder values, it all came down to this: John Gutfreund and Tom Strauss were prepared to scrap the largest takeover of all time because their firm’s name would go on the right side, not the left side, of a tombstone advertisement buried among the stock tables at the back of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.”
― Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

“Everyone has the seventh-grade story where, you know, they make the field trip and then all the white kids start treating them differently,” says Ruben Cordova, a San Antonio art historian. “Davy Crockett’s [death], it’s sort of like a Chicano version of the Jewish Christ killers. If you’re looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin. We killed Davy Crockett.”
― Bryan Burrough, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth

“It is one of the Texas Revolt’s dark little secrets that, even after the Mexican “invasion”—or perhaps because of it—the great mass of Texians and Tejanos wanted nothing to do with Travis or the Alamo or fighting Mexican soldiers. Most had never wanted to revolt in the first place.”
― Bryan Burrough, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth

“The Roaring Eighties were a new gilded age, where winning was celebrated at all costs.”
― Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

“I know the name of your seventh-grade Texas History teacher.” When the Texan expresses skepticism that this could be possible, you smile and say, “Coach.”
― Bryan Burrough, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth

“But there was no denying Purvis’s ineptitude in the Dillinger hunt. Suspects were found then lost. His informants were hopeless. He raided the wrong apartments. He built no bridges to the Chicago police while annoying other departments. He’d had his car stolen from in front of his house.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“Something had to be done fast. A letter: that was the answer. As many lawyers do when nursing a grievance, Nusbaum knew it was important to get their anger down into writing. As Cohen and the investment bankers shouted and cursed around him, he began dictating”
― Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

“Hands up! Hands up! Everybody on the floor!” The effect was akin to three wild-eyed berserkers storming a prayer meeting.”
― Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

“Murchison’s”
― Bryan Burrough, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes