Hello. I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader and quotes collector. Here is a list of 14 quotes that I liked and saved while reading Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Empire of Pain Quotes
In the twentieth century, power announced itself. In the twenty-first, the surest way to spot real power is by its understatement.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
This is a familiar dynamic for a lot of prosecutors with a mortgage and tuitions to think about. You spend the first half of your career going after the bad guys and then the second half representing them.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
The doctor is feted and courted by drug companies with the ardor of a spring love affair. The industry covets his soul and his prescription pad because he is in a unique economic position; he tells the consumer what to buy.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
People who achieve a certain level of wealth and professional renown often tend, at a certain point, to start buying art. Perhaps this mode of acquisition is an effort to silence some inner doubt about their own place in the culture, or perhaps it merely represents a new realm to be conquered.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
The notion that the FDA actually protects American consumers was nothing but a comforting myth.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
There is a limited window in which a maker of branded drugs can reap outsized profits. Even when a drug is tremendously lucrative—in fact, especially when a drug is tremendously lucrative—the drugmaker is always selling on borrowed time, conscious that at some fixed point in the future the patent will expire and the generics will come rushing in to decimate profits.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
Opioids can deliver you, if only for a few minutes, from physical or emotional pain, from discomfort, from anxiety, from need. It is like no other human experience.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
It is a peculiar hallmark of the American economy that you can produce a dangerous product and effectively off-load any legal liability for whatever destruction that product may cause by pointing to the individual responsibility of the consumer.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
In any family dynasty in which great wealth is created, the second generation is often less impressive than the first.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
If there was one thing, apart from donating money, that the Sacklers knew how to do, it was sell opioids.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
One unadvertised hazard in the life of a plutocrat is that the people around you can be prone to yes-man sycophancy. In theory, you should be able to avail yourself of state-of-the-art counsel. But instead, you often get lousy advice, because your courtiers are careful to tell you only what they think you want to hear. The danger, whether you are a billionaire executive or the president of the United States, is that you end up compounding this problem yourself, by marginalizing any dissenting voices and creating a bubble in which loyalty is rewarded above all else.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
One problem for the Sacklers was that, unlike a lot of human beings, they didn’t seem to learn from what they saw transpiring in the world around them. They could produce a rehearsed simulacrum of human empathy, but they seemed incapable of comprehending their own role in the story, and impervious to any genuine moral epiphany.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
London, a city long favored by oligarchs with unsavory fortunes.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe
As a journalist, most stories you write don’t make a ripple. They chronicle reality, but only rarely change it.
from Empire of Pain book by Patrick Radden Keefe