“The Colombo family is in absolute tatters. The Luchese family is not far behind. The Genovese family is decimated and there is more to be done. Gravano was instrumental to it all.”
-New York prosecutor John Gleeson, on Sammy Gravano’s testimony against his former Mafia confederates, which won him a lenient five-year sentence for 19 murders and other crimes.
“Just about everything we have that’s fun comes from the United States. If it weren’t for Americans, we wouldn’t have baseball caps. We wouldn’t have malls or fast-food shops or skateboards. Life just wouldn’t be as good.”
-A 16-year-old German boy, on the departure of the last American GIs from Berlin.
“They tend to be fixed on a false history that says if you’ve got a president who presses the right buttons in a Democratic Congress, anything can be done. They all think back to Franklin Roosevelt, when they should be thinking of Jimmy Carter.”
-Yale political scientist David Mayhew, on the tendency of Democratic presidents to overreach, as Bill Clinton did on health care.
