White Collar Crime Quotes

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America's "Wild West" of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father.

New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world's epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa.

Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever.

After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach.

While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced ~ James M. LaRossa Jr.

My father used to always say to me that, you know, if a guy goes out to steal a loaf of bread to feed his family, they'll give him 10 years, but a guy can do white-collar crime and steal the money of thousands and he'll get probation and a slap on the wrist. ~ Jesse Ventura

Month to month there were many discrepancies carried forward without resolution through what I jokingly called my "999 (or Nick Leeson)" account. ~ Jon Edgell

Identity theft involving these cards is a growing form of white collar crime, facilitating illegal immigration, banking and accounting fraud, tax evasion, and other nefarious activities. ~ Ron Lewis

Adam and Eve each denied their own responsibility when confronted by God because they saw themselves as too important to be wrong, to be weak, to be vulnerable to the shrewdness of a mere serpent. The dramatic increase in self-importance over the turn of the millennium, occurring alongside a steady increase in divorce, white-collar crime, morbid obesity, and high-profile falls from grace, smacks of a similar stink. We're too important for silly rules. We can't be expected to keep promises we made after circumstances change. Give us enough time, and we'll figure out who's really to blame for the trouble we find ourselves in. Jake ~ David A. Zimmerman

Hirschi was convinced that people who were usefully busy didn't commit crimes. "The child playing ping-pong, swimming in the community pool, or doing his homework," he said, "is not committing delinquent acts." Hirschi didn't spend a whole lot of time looking at people who had good jobs and became criminals anyway, completely ignoring in this way a whole class of crime. White-collar crime by its very nature involves a high degree of self-control and planning. It's committed almost overwhelmingly by people who had enough self-mastery to make it through high school and college and hold down good jobs. ~ Matt Taibbi

The grandeur of the thieving falsity is larceny, the fall of cities. ~ Justin K. McFarlane Beau

white-collar crime costs the communities in which it occurs more money than common crimes, but because white-collar criminals steal with a pencil they get away with it, while the eighteen-year-old kid who steals with a gun goes to prison for a long time. ~ Joseph Hilldorfer

Men commit murder and all sorts of mayhem, in a few years they're back on the streets. Highway robbery and white collar crime, and they laugh at the system they beat. ~ Waylon Jennings

Government has coddled, accepted, and ignored white collar crime for too long. It is time the nation woke up and realized that it's not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it's the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most. They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives. ~ Harry Markopolos

White-collar crime gets more outrageous by the second in America. ~ Sara Paretsky

I do like Captain Beefheart (Trout Mask Replica is a misunderstood masterpiece!) and I do have two kids but I've never written a prize winning novel called Oh, Bollocks! ~ Jon Edgell

If one tallied all of the losses suffered by victims of robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts combined, the figure wouldn't even approach what is taken from hardworking Americans' pockets by employers who violate the nation's labor laws. ~ Kathryn Edin

Too many crooks spoil the Roth. ~ Brian Spellman

White Collar Crime
White collar crime is neither immoral nor evil ~ it's simply unlawful.
We should think of it as a subspecies of gambling;
we wager the potential loss of our freedom against a big payout.
Win or lose, we get to live in a big house. ~ Beryl Dov

The possibility of bringing white-collar criminals to justice is ever receding over the horizon. ~ Sara Paretsky

A crime is a crime, regardless of what collar you wear. ~ Jesse Ventura

In 1951, the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills published a study titled White Collar: The American Middle Classes.26 Like Ronald Coase, Mills was fascinated by the rise of large managerial corporations. He argued that these firms, in their pursuit of scale and efficiency, had created a vast tier of workers who carried out repetitive, mechanistic tasks that stifled their imagination and, ultimately, their ability to fully participate in society. In short, Mills argued, the typical corporate worker was alienated. For many, that alienation was captured in the warning printed on the Hollerith punch cards that, thanks to IBM and other data processing firms, became ubiquitous symbols and agents of bureaucratized life during the 1950s and 1960s: "Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate. ~ Moises Naim

I am starting to explore directing, maybe in the future in the world of 'White Collar.' ~ Willie Garson

physical space has for a century been used to facilitate and enforce efficiency and specialization. Along with factory assembly lines, the architectural frames of white-collar work have evolved to maximize efficiency. ~ Stanley McChrystal

Emilia typed in her password and checked her inbox. A review by the Secretariat de Gobernación of drug cartel activities across Mexico. A report of a robbery in Acapulco's poorest barrio neighborhood that would probably never be investigated. Notice of a reward for a child kidnapped in Ixtapa who was almost certainly dead by now.
Her phone rang. It was the desk sergeant saying that a Señor Rooker wished to see her. Emilia avoided Rico's eye as she said, yes, the sergeant could let el señor pass into the detectives' area.
A minute later Rucker was standing by her desk, sweat beaded on his forehead. The starched collar of his shirt was damp.
"There's a head," he said breathlessly. "Someone's head in a bucket on the hood of my car. ~ Carmen Amato

She sometimes takes her little brother for a walk round this way," explained Bingo. "I thought we would meet her and bow, and you could see her, you know, and then we would walk on."
"Of course," I said, "that's enough excitement for anyone, and undoubtedly a corking reward for tramping three miles out of one's way over ploughed fields with tight boots, but don't we do anything else? Don't we tack on to the girl and buzz along with her?"
"Good Lord!" said Bingo, honestly amazed. "You don't suppose I've got nerve enough for that, do you? I just look at her from afar off and all that sort of thing. Quick! Here she comes! No, I'm wrong!"
It was like that song of Harry Lauder's where he's waiting for the girl and says, "This is her-r-r. No, it's a rabbut." Young Bingo made me stand there in the teeth of a nor'-east half-gale for ten minutes, keeping me on my toes with a series of false alarms, and I was just thinking of suggesting that we should lay off and give the rest of the proceedings a miss, when round the corner there came a fox-terrier, and Bingo quivered like an aspen. Then there hove in sight a small boy, and he shook like a jelly. Finally, like a star whose entrance has been worked up by the personnel of the ensemble, a girl appeared, and his emotion was painful to witness. His face got so red that, what with his white collar and the fact that the wind had turned his nose blue, he looked more like a French flag than anything else. He sagged from the wais ~ P.G. Wodehouse

This usually happens in the white-collar classes: These people take to worshipping pointlessness. Examples are Twin Peaks, Christo's artwork, and academic liberal politics. But a strange thing happens; these people view their ultra pointlessness as a way of being like God. ~ Noah Cicero

The idea that because the school day is shorter or the school year is shorter than the sort of white collar workday or work year, that does not actually capture how teachers spend their time. ~ Dana Goldstein

members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desparately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots...
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion... All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet pp89-90 ~ Richard M. Rorty

When white-collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time and energy, but their personalities as well. They sell by the week, or month, their smiles and their kindly gestures, and they must practice that prompt repression of resentment and aggression. ~ C. Wright Mills

Doing 'White Collar,' quite often my character goes undercover, so therein lies the compounding of the imagination. I get to play Peter Burke and then someone else when Peter Burke goes undercover. ~ Tim DeKay

Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food. ~ Joel Salatin

Lissa's guardians- she had a fleet now- walked with her. I was among them, wearing my finest black and white, including the red collar marking me as a royal guardian. ~ Richelle Mead

I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

IT'S EASY to poke fun at nonsensical office speak. For one thing, it sounds exhausting: a colleague might "reach out," "drill down," and promise to "circle back" in a single e-mail. But by signaling membership in a white-collar tribe, meaningless jargon can be quite powerful. ~ Anonymous

In books, coaching sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. The most blatant of these, in my experience, was the EST-like, victim-blaming ideology represented by Patrick Knowles and the books he recommended to his boot-camp participants. Recall that at the boot camp, the timid suggestion that there might be an outer world defined by the market or ruled by CEOs was immediately rebuked; there was only us, the job seekers. It was we who had to change. In a milder form, the constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what you will it to be. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

you, and have no little girls' clothes to mend." "Yes," said Maggie. "It is with me as I used to think it would be with the poor uneasy white bear I saw at the show. I thought he must have got so stupid with the habit of turning backward and forward in that narrow space that he would keep doing it if they set him free. One gets a bad habit of being unhappy." "But I shall put you under a discipline of pleasure that will make you lose that bad habit," said Lucy, sticking the black butterfly absently in her own collar, while her eyes met Maggie's affectionately. "You dear, tiny thing," said Maggie, in one of her bursts of loving admiration, "you enjoy other people's happiness so much, I believe you would do without any of your own. I wish I were like you." "I've never been tried in that way," said Lucy. "I've always ~ George Eliot

They're trying to breed a nation of techno-peasants. Educated just enough to keep things going, but not enough to ask tough questions. They encourage any meme that downplays thoughtful analysis or encourages docility or self indulgence or uniformity. In what other society do people use "smart" and "wise" as insults? We tell people "don't get smart." Those who try, those who really like to learn, we call "nerds." Look at television or the press or the trivia that passes for political debate. When a candidate DOES try to talk about the issues, the newspapers talk about his sex life. Look at Saturday morning cartoon shows. Peasants, whether they're tilling fields or stuffing circuit boards, are easier to manipulate. Don't question; just believe. Turn off your computer and Trust the Force.

Or turn your computer on and treat it like the Oracle of Delphi.

That's right. They've made education superficial and specialized. Science classes for art majors? Forget it! And how many business or engineering students get a really good grounding in the humanities? When did universities become little more than white collar vocational schools? ~ Michael Flynn

Her entire life, she'd been told sin was wrong, a black and white interpretation of what is evil and what is holy in the world - colored like a priest's robe and collar - but she never believed it to be true. Sin was colorful: scarlet like rose blood, azure like skin deprived oxygen, violet as bruises, jade as rot; a colorful contradiction to the darkness and blinding light all are taught sin and holiness to be. ~ Madi Merek

Brian discovers that this first group features two bricklayers, a machinist, a doctor, a gun-store owner, a veterinarian, a plumber, a barber, an auto mechanic, a farmer, a fry cook, and an electrician. The second group - Brian thinks of them as the Dependents - features the sick, the young, and all the white-collar workers with obscure administrative backgrounds. These are the former middle managers and office drones, the paper pushers and corporate executives who once pulled down six-figure incomes running divisions of huge multinationals - now just taking up space, as obsolete as cassette tapes. ~ Robert Kirkman

Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. ~ Malcolm Forbes

The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform. Our blue-collar work is pattern recognition, making sense of what you see. Gardeners will still have jobs because every garden is different. The same goes for construction workers. The losers are white-collar workers, low-level accountants, brokers, and agents. ~ Michio Kaku

The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do - put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Thought I saw you on the beach this morning...Thought I saw you standing on the white strand, your back to the wind. The rain had stopped and there was a brisk clarity in the air. You watched me over your left shoulder, head tucked in coyly. Seabirds flying low in the sky, and the grey-green waves at your foot. A whole panorama thrown up behind you.

I was on the coast road coming back from the shops. I stopped walking once I caught sight of you. You were wearing a reefer jacket with the collar turned up against the weather. It might have been navy, but it looked black in the distance. As did your trousers. As did your shoes. All of you was black except your face and hair. You wore no hat...Never once saw you in Winter clothes, yet there you were as clear as day for a whole moment. Only your eyes were visible above the upturned collar. Your hair was in your eyes. You watched me through those pale strands. And I watched you. Intently.

The man from down the road drove by in his faded red car. He was going the other way, so he didn't offer a lift. He just waved. I waved back. And then I turned to you again, and we looked at each other a little longer. Very calm. Heart barely shifted. Too far away to see your features. No matter. There was salt on your face. Sea salt. It was in your hair. It was on your mouth. It was all over you, as though you gazed at me through ice. And it was all over me. It tingled on my skin.

After a time I moved off, and you ~ Claire Kilroy

Ennek realised what an enormous mistake it had been to buy the thing. Miner was stunning. The sweater was high enough on his neck to almost hide the iron collar. He reminded Ennek of ocean waves, white foam over sea green, but Miner was warm and soft, with a shy little smile and a slight blush on his cheeks. Ennek wanted to drown in him. ~ Kim Fielding

Mr. Wonderful was probably taking his sweet time, right?"
"No, it was actually my fault this morning. I was busy with…paperwork."
"Oh. Well, that's alright. Don't worry about it. What kind of paperwork?"
He smiled. "Nothing important."
Mr. Kadam held the door for me, and we walked out into an empty hallway. I was just starting to relax at the elevator doors when I heard a hotel room door close. Ren walked down the hall toward us. He'd purchased new clothes. Of course, he looked wonderful. I took a step back from the elevator and tried to avoid eye contact.
Ren wore a brand new pair of dark-indigo, purposely faded, urban-destruction designer jeans. His shirt was long-sleeved, buttoned-down, crisp, oxford-style and was obviously of high quality. It was blue with thin white stripes that matched is eyes perfectly. He'd rolled up the sleeves and left his shirt untucked and open at the collar. It was also an athletic cut, so it fit tightly to his muscular torso, which made me suck in an involuntary breath in appreciation of his male splendor.
He looks like a runway model. How in the world am I going to be able to reject that? The world is so unfair. Seriously, it's like turning Brad Pitt down for a date. The girl who could actually do it should win an award for idiot of the century.
I again quickly ran through my list of reasons for not being with Ren and said a few "He's not for me's." The good thing about seeing his mouthwatering self and watchi ~ Colleen Houck

My government is going to deal with all forms of corruption. White-collar corruption will be high on the list and we are going to plug all gaps that are being used by corrupt leaders (and) business people. ~ Jakaya Kikwete

Preacher pulled her gun to her lap, the trigger aimed toward the stranger. . . . He stared at her like he was ready to dial 911, until he saw she was of European heritage, saw her clerical collar, saw the Bible on the dashboard. White, blond, and Christian. Trifecta. The man's shoulders relaxed and he smiled, waved, and kept going. ~ Eric Jerome Dickey

The obvious liberal rejoinders come to mind: What about the child whose home is hit by a bomb? Did she have some bomb-shaped thoughtform that brought ruin down on her head? And did my [fired white-collar workers] boot-camp mates cause the layoffs that drove them out of their jobs by "vibrating" at a layoff-related frequency? It seems inexcusably cruel to tell people who have reach some kind of personal nadir that their probem is entirely of their own making ... ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach? [...] Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn't all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn't accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away. ~ Thomas Frank

Gavin turned us to face Josh, a satisfied grin springing up when he noticed the condition of Josh's clothes.
"Thanks for the last-minute invitation, man." Josh chuckled, patting Gavin on the shoulder. "Shall I do the honors, Mr. Suave?"
"Sure thing, Frodo Baggins. By the way, I hear the Shire has impeccable dinner parties this time of year." The corners of Gavin's lips twitched and his eyebrows shot up as he gestured to a food stain of some sort near the collar of Josh's white shirt.
Josh's chin shot down to follow Gavin's amusement and he quickly tried to wipe away the crumbs. "Yeah, well ... you know how we hobbits like to eat. ~ Rachael Wade

There's a dream I keep having," Sheridan whispered into the telephone. "The dream has always been the same - until tonight."

"And what happened tonight?" asked Lil' John.

Sheridan hesitated, his words stumbling out in tentative phrases: "The man in my dream . . . he spoke to me for the first time . . . he told me of a sacred gift that had been lost . . . a gift that could save the world."

"Your dream," John urged gently. "Is the gods conspiring to give you freedom, just like the elders sang that night in the Sundance ceremony:"
When worlds collide
There sounds a tolling
A call to rise
And seize the moment
The gods conspire
To give us freedom
When worlds collide
The journey has begun
Sheridan pulled at the collar of his t-shirt, Lil' John's words suffocating him. Pushing back from the precipice of dread, Sheridan strained to speak, his husky words weak and staggering: "What are you saying?"

"Your search for the sacred gift has already begun . . . ~ Phillip R. White