When corporate executives get really excited, they leverage their learnings against comprehension to revolutionize English.

Do you know the difference between neurotics and psychotics?” “Neurotics build castles in the sky; psychotics move into them.

There are scores of people who have never recovered, or been recovered, from an FSB interrogation.They’re a hard organization to describe because nothing like the FSB exists in the USA. To get even remotely close, you’d have to ask the CIA to birth a seven-headed hydra with the faces of the FBI, DEA, NSA, Immigration, Border Patrol, Coast Guard, and the Navy Seals with a hangover and a grudge.

Both Bratva and thieves in law would like to call themselves nihilists and anarchists because they don’t support the established government, but they govern nonetheless, and you can’t be an anarchist unless you follow its rule. Crime and anarchy are no more synonymous than nihilism and existentialism, or fatalism and determinism; so many isms there was bound to be a schism.

тот что нас не убивает нас не интересует. 'That which cannot kill us does not interest us.' Exhaling poison, he explains, 'Nice sentiment shared by thieves and Bratva.

There’s no English equivalent for silovik. It doesn’t translate succinctly because to create something as Machiavellian as a silovik requires both the KGB and the GRU, and then a shift from communism to capitalism followed by a gear-grinding reverse into despotism.

Few know it, but the Devil rewards insurrection. After all, rebellion is the original sin, and he did conceive it.

The birth of a legend is the death of a hero. Every man wishes to die a hero. A hero’s death is glorious!

Fate would have it that the timing of your birth determines your measure of luck. You’re either born lucky or you’re not, though the only way to know for sure is to test it. The problem with that is most people find out they’re not lucky at the worst possible moment, usually in the throes of death or arrest.

From what I’d witnessed, honesty didn’t really make anyone happy. The truth was a punch to the gut, and while you were falling, a knee to the face, then you could lie on the floor and bleed for a spell.