Daily Inspiration Quote by Meyer Lansky

The genius of Lansky's line is how calmly it tries to launder blood through vocabulary. "We're not murderers" isn’t a denial so much as a strategic narrowing of the charge: he doesn’t reject violence as a means, he rejects the label that makes violence morally legible. The pivot - "just businessmen" - is the real move, a bid to relocate organized crime from the gutter to the boardroom, where harm is often abstracted into ledgers, contracts, and "externalities."

"Take advantage of opportunities" is corporate America’s favorite euphemism, and Lansky borrows it like a stolen suit. The phrase turns predation into initiative, coercion into hustle, extortion into market savvy. It’s not an accident that he frames the enterprise as reactive, opportunistic, even almost innocent. Opportunities, after all, simply appear; someone merely capitalizes. That grammatical passivity is the trick: the victims disappear from the sentence.

Context matters: Lansky emerged in a 20th-century economy where Prohibition, gambling, and labor rackets thrived in the gaps between public demand and legal supply. The gangster as "businessman" wasn’t only spin; it was a self-mythology tailored for courts, reporters, and a nation enthralled by capitalism’s winners. The subtext is a dare: if society respects profit and rewards savvy, where exactly is the line - at violence, or only at violence without a balance sheet? Lansky’s charm lies in making that question feel uncomfortably plausible.