
“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
Variant: Behind every successful fortune there is a crime.
Source: The Godfather
Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.
Part II
A variant, "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime," has appeared as a quotation of Balzac; but it may have originated in a paraphrase in The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (1971) by Richard O'Connor, p. 47: "Balzac maintained that behind every great fortune there is a great crime." It also appears at the beginning of the novel "The Godfather," published two years earlier.
Le Père Goriot (1835)
Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.
Le Père Goriot (1835)
“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
Variant: Behind every successful fortune there is a crime.
Source: The Godfather
“Housework, if it is done properly, can cause brain damage.”
“…death came so easily, hardly announced, without apparent cause, often greeted with smiles.”
Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)
Arnas Arnæus
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden
“Nothing great is done without great men, and they are great because they wanted it.”
On ne fait rien de grand sans de grands hommes, et ceux-ci le sont pour l'avoir voulu.
in Vers l’armée de métier.
Writings
Blonde Over Blue.
Song lyrics, River of Dreams (1993)
"Gods and Greens" (1989)
1990s, A View from the Diner's Club (1991)
“He had forgotten the Cause. When the guns began firing he had forgotten it completely.”
Part IV, CH 6: Chamberlain, p. 365
The Killer Angels (1974)