There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.
Interpretation
The pursuit of wealth often comes at a significant cost to individuals and communities, highlighting the corruption inherent in the system.
Raymond Chandler suggests that the quest for making large sums of money is fraught with ethical dilemmas and negative consequences for society. He points out that many businesses and decent people suffer when big money and power dominate, ultimately reflecting the systemic issues that allow such exploitation to occur.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about the ethical implications of wealth accumulation.
Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning.
The mind is a product of experience. It is the result of past thinking and is modified by present thinking.
Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village-the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.
What cities, as great as this, have... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.
Even though we may focus first on the rights of our own country, that does not mean that we should disregard the rights of everyone else.
I wasn't the biggest Captain America fan, but increasingly, I see him as a great character. Winter Soldier really got into what it meant to actually represent America.
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