I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!
Hyman, an older gangster, is telling Michael to stop complaining, stop asking who ordered which murder, and accept that occasional murders are a routine fact of life in the gangster business. Moe Green, a young man Hyman mentored, was one of the people whose assassination Michael ordered at the end of The Godfather. Hyman's reference to Moe Green is a signal to Michael that Hyman seeks no revenge against Michael. Hyman prioritizes business over personal relationships, that Michael should do the same if he wishes to succeed in "business."
There was something in it for me, on my own.
Fredo carries a grudge that Michael got chosen to head the Corleone family, despite the fact that Michael is younger. This is the same grudge that drove Fredo to align with Hyman Roth and inadvertently condone a hit against Michael. Throughout the first two Godfather films, Fredo is depicted as a small and stupid man, and in this scene, we see just to what extent his insecurities and self-interest drive him.
My father taught me a lot in this house. In this room, he taught me, "Keep your friends close, but enemies closer."
Michael recounts to Frank Pantangeli the mob wisdom his father passed on to him in the very childhood home where the two are meeting, the one Frank now inhabits. It's meant as a veiled threat to Frank, who Michael suspects may have ordered the hit against him. But it also illustrates Michael's commitment to viewing his family as totally entangled with his mob enterprise. It's one of the two times in the film, after all, when Michael reminisces about his father.
Senator, we’re both part of the same hypocrisy, but don’t think that it applies to my family.
Spoken to Senator Pat Geary when the senator denigrates Michael's business, heritage, and family, Michael makes it clear that he believes all of American business is one big racket that both he and Geary are trying to profit off of. But Michael's warning not to bring his family into the discussion is a strange claim when he, in fact, does just about everything he can to make sure the family runs like a criminal enterprise. After all, this scene comes during a sequence when Michael is using his son's first communion as an excuse to hold a number of business meetings.
Nothing is left but our friendship.
This is what Tom tells Senator Geary when he goes to Fredo's brothel to clean up after Geary has been set up to think that he killed a sex worker while blacked out. The offer of friendship is a clear signal that the Corleones have Geary cornered and he will now do their bidding. But it also speaks to the handshake relationship between American government and business which, in this situation, is only different in that the business happens to be an organized crime family.
But it occurred to me. The soldiers are paid to fight. The rebels aren’t.
Michael remarks this to Hyman Roth at his rooftop birthday celebration in Havana, casting doubt on Roth's plans to successfully build casinos in Cuba. It's one of the few prescient statements Michael makes in the film, and seems to speak to Michael's wiles as head of an organization full of both soldiers and, given the assassination attempt, rebels. Of course, Michael's fate is not all that different than Batista's, at the end of the day.
Le onore de la famiglia sta posto.
Spoken by Tom to Frank Pantangeli's brother at the Senate hearing where Frank is supposed to testify against Michael, this roughly translates to "the honor of the family is intact." It rings as some real old-world mob stuff, bleeding into and ultimately tainting the bureaucratic processes of the American legal system.
Oh Michael, Michael you are blind. It wasn’t a miscarriage. It was an abortion. An abortion, Michael.
Indeed, by this point in the film, when Kay is leaving Michael and admits to aborting their child, Michael has been proven quite blind. He didn't realize that Hyman Roth would try to kill him, that Fredo would be complicit, that the Las Vegas deal would fall apart, or that Frank would flip to help the feds. When Michael hits Kay during this conversation, it just may as well be over the abortion as over the keen identification of Michael's inability to see what's happening right under his nose.
I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies. That’s all.
One of the more iconic lines from the film, this comes when Michael orders the hit against Hyman Roth at the airport. It shows Michael at his most spiteful and cold-hearted, left with little family but plenty of enemies to take revenge on. It turns out that he didn't do a great job at either keeping his friends close, or his enemies closer.
Try to think as people around you think. On that basis, anything’s possible.
Michael's advice given to Tom Hagen early in the movie is advice he should have well followed himself. Throughout the film we watch Michael burrow deeper into his own obsessions, be that the search for the traitor in his family or his attempts to open legitimate casinos. Perhaps if he spent more time thinking as the people around him were thinking, he would have sensed the impending betrayals and abandonment.
