Politics & Power Quote by Mario Puzo

A clean, confident declaration that instantly sounds like a pledge and quickly reveals itself as a transaction. In two short lines, Puzo gives you the emotional surface of the immigrant success story while letting the subtext leak through: belief is framed less as faith than as investment, and patriotism lands as a ledger entry. The repetition of "America" works like a salesman’s patter, turning a nation into a brand name you can invoke for protection, legitimacy, and profit.

Puzo, writing out of the Italian-American experience and into the long shadow of suspicion around it, understands how belonging can be conditional. "I believe in America" performs assimilation, a public vow of gratitude that aims to disarm prejudice. But the follow-up - "America's made my fortune" - tilts the line toward opportunism, even fatalism: the system didn’t just allow success, it produced it, almost mechanically. The speaker is both grateful and unsentimental, implying that America is not a moral ideal so much as a machine that rewards whoever learns its gears.

In The Godfather's world, that machine has glitches: courts can fail you, respectable institutions can be bought, and justice may require a private infrastructure. The line’s intent is to establish credibility before a moral compromise, a ritual of respectability that precedes a request for something the official America won’t provide. Puzo’s brilliance is that the sentence can be read as either sincere praise or a cynical alibi - and in a country built on hustles and hopes, those are often the same thing.