John Dickie > Quotes

“Tutti colpevoli, nessuno colpevole,’ as the Italian saying has it: ‘If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“the origins of the mafia are closely related to the origins of an untrustworthy state – the Italian state.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“French rule brought a whole series of innovations in the way the Kingdom was run. Out went feudalism, and in came private property. Out went a messy assemblage of local customs, baronial and church jurisdictions, and public ordinances: in came a new code of civil law and the beginnings of a police force. The southern part of the Italian peninsula began to resemble a modern, centralised state.”
― John Dickie, Blood Brotherhoods: A History of Italy's Three Mafias

“the mafia kills in the way a state does; it does not murder, it executes.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Mafiosi, for Franchetti, were entrepreneurs in violence, specialists who had developed what today would be called the most sophisticated business model in the marketplace. Under the leadership of their bosses, mafia bands ‘invested’ violence in various commercial spheres in order to extort protection money and guarantee monopolies. This was what he called the violence industry. As Franchetti wrote, [in the violence industry] the mafia boss . . . acts as capitalist, impresario and manager. He unifies the management of the crimes committed . . . he regulates the way labour and duties are divided out, and controls discipline amongst the workers. (Discipline is indispensable in this as in any other industry if abundant and constant profits are to be obtained.) It is the mafia boss’s job to judge from circumstances whether the acts of violence should be suspended for a while, or multiplied and made fiercer. He has to adapt to market conditions to choose which operations to carry out, which people to exploit, which form of violence to use.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“The camorra turned the needs and rights of their fellow prisoners (like their bread or their pizzo) into favours. Favours that had to be paid for, one way or another. The camorra system was based on the power to grant those favours and to take them away. Or even to throw them in people’s faces. The real cruelty of the turnip-throwing episode is that the camorrista was bestowing a favour that he could just as easily have withheld.”
― John Dickie, Blood Brotherhoods: A History of Italy's Three Mafias

“The America that emerged victorious from the Revolutionary War was a laboratory of political communication. By shaking off monarchical rule, the Republic had also forsaken all the rituals and emblems that created the aura surrounding the European thrones. No more sceptres and crowns; no more cathedral coronations and Te deums. To fill that vacuum, the United States created the cult of George Washington; and George Washington, in his turn, made Freemasonry into a patriotic liturgy.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“Al contadino non gli far sapere, quanto sia buono il cacio colle pere’ –”
― John Dickie, Delizia!

“Above all, mafiosi in both Sicily and the US continued to think of themselves as a breed apart from other human beings and even other criminals. American or Sicilian, to be a man of honour means to operate beyond society’s measures of right and wrong.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“If Freemasonry has helped make the modern world, it is in part because it offers a refuge from the turmoil outside.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“Capitalism runs on investment, and lawlessness puts investment at risk. No one wants to buy new machinery or more land to plant with commercial crops when there is a strong risk that those machines or crops will be stolen or vandalized by competitors. When it supplanted feudalism, the modern state was supposed to establish a monopoly on violence, on the power to wage war and punish criminals. When the modern state monopolizes violence in this way, it helps create the conditions in which commerce can flourish. The barons’ ramshackle, unruly private militias were scheduled to disappear. Franchetti argued that the key to the development of the mafia in Sicily was that the state had fallen catastrophically short of this ideal. It was untrustworthy because, after 1812, it failed to establish its monopoly on the use of violence. The barons’ power on the ground was such that the central state’s courts and policemen could be pressurized into doing what the local lord wanted. Worse still, it was now no longer only the barons who felt they had the right to use force. Violence became ‘democratized’,”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Evidently Dr Galati’s problems were not just the fault of a bunch of criminals; they came in large part because he could not trust the police”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“It should hardly need saying that German Freemasonry could not wield remotely the kind of influence that Ludendorff and Hitler alleged.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“In its rules”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“The single most important turning point in the history of organized crime in America was not an execution”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“There is”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“The anti-Masonic conspiracy theory become a model for modern anti-Semitism. Belief in a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy spread to non-Catholics. In German-speaking countries, for example, it was incorporated into a local variant of extreme nationalism known as the völkisch ideology (from Volk – people, or soul of the people): it combined anti-Semitism, a hatred of democracy and ‘Jewish capitalism’, and nostalgia for a fairy-tale Teutonic past.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“Mistrust has contaminated Italian democracy since its birth in the aftermath of the Second World War. Many Sicilians”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism was idiotic. It has nothing to contribute to our understanding of the causes of the French Revolution. Yet it does still have much to teach us about how conspiracy-thinking makes complex events seem simple, and makes us feel clever for oversimplifying them.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“there was a profoundly arrogant assumption at work in the white Masonic mind: the Craft, as the highest expression of human wisdom, came to the Americas in fulfilment of the natives’ deepest spiritual inclinations.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“Humility – umiltà in Italian or umirtà in Sicilian – is a word that jumps off the page. It is now considered to be the most likely origin for the word omertà. Omertà is the mafia’s code of silence, and the obligation not to speak to the police that it imposes on those within its sphere of influence. Evidently omertà was originally a code of submission.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Maranzano’s death can be taken”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Hitler’s anti-Masonry exemplified his ability to combine fanaticism with pragmatism: his overarching, obsessive hatred of ‘the Jew’ allowed other components of his ideology, notably anti-Communism, to be deployed when they would be most popular and have most impact.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“Palermo also seemed like a stone palimpsest of cultures stretching back over many hundreds of years.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“The government”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“We produce enough food for 12 billion living souls, and there are only 6 billion 300 thousand of us on earth. Eight hundred million people suffer from malnutrition and hunger; one billion 700 million suffer from obesity. Madness! It is madness to continue asking more from the earth. Plundering resources and obeying the logic that says all consumption must be fast, abundant and wasteful: it’s all reaching the end of the line. The end of the line…. What isn’t made clear is just how complicit we are. Just how responsible as individual consumers in the so-called developed world…. We are complicit, we are involved. So you, the peasants of the so-called developing world, you have to show us the way. The way to an economy that can make consumption and agriculture local once more….”
― John Dickie, Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food

“He needed to make the phantasmagorical threat to his equally phantasmagorical Aryan race seem real, biological. There could be no excuses, no margin of doubt, no fiddly process of sorting out the innocent from the guilty. He hated Freemasonry, but to let any attack on it clutter the call for a war on Jews would be to rob his ideology of its brutal simplicity.”
― John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

“they named her Giuseppina Pace Umana—‘Josephine Human Peace’.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“The mafia’s methods were honed during a period of rapid growth in the citrus fruit industry.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“For a decade and a half after the unification of Italy”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia