Politics & Power Quote by Al Capone

Coming from Al Capone, this is motivational boilerplate with a switchblade behind it. He wraps himself in the soft patriotism of “Americanism” and the respectable abstraction of “capitalism,” then shrugs - “call it what you will” - as if labels are just marketing. That casual relativism is the tell: for Capone, the system isn’t a moral order, it’s a set of available angles.

The line flatters the listener with agency (“each and every one of us”) while quietly rewriting what “opportunity” means. In a straight civic reading, opportunity implies social mobility through legitimate work. In Capone’s world, opportunity is the ability to convert chaos into cash: to exploit Prohibition, buy protection, intimidate rivals, and treat law as a cost of doing business. “Seize it with both hands” lands differently when the speaker’s hands are famously not clean. The phrase sells hustle; the subtext normalizes predation.

Context matters: the early 20th-century U.S. was a booming, unequal machine with porous institutions and a national ban that created a massive illicit market overnight. Capone’s genius wasn’t inventing corruption; it was industrializing it. This quote performs a kind of rhetorical laundering, positioning his empire as an exaggerated version of the same competitive ethos celebrated in legitimate enterprise. It’s not an argument for capitalism so much as a dare: if the culture worships winners and measures virtue in profit, how shocked can it be when a criminal speaks the language better than the bankers?