"We are soldiers"

Hell? You been listening to me? No.... We’re soldiers, and soldiers don’t go to hell. It’s war. Soldiers, they kill other soldiers; we’re in a situation where everybody involved knows the stakes and if you’re going to accept those stakes, you gotta do certain things. It’s business. We’re soldiers. We follow codes. Orders.

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Excuse me, let me tell you something, when America opened up the floodgates and let us Italians in, what do you think they were doing that for, because they were trying to save us from poverty? No, they did it because they needed us, they needed us to build their cities and dig their subways and to make them richer. The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees, and there we were. But some of us didn’t want to swarm around their hives and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us—honor, and family, and loyalty. And some of us wanted a piece of the action. Now we weren’t educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, those other, the J. P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was business, right, the American way.