I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
— Thomas Jefferson
Unusual Swindling quotations
There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.
Doesn't the fight for survival also justify swindle and theft? In self defence, anything goes.
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle;
and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.
When the artist ... intends from the beginning to be obscure and take obscurity as his objective or goal for its own sake and wishes to astonish, shock, and seem mysterious, that is a swindle.
It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
Undoubtedly there are, in connection with each of these things, cases of fraud, swindling, and other financial crimes; that is to say, the greed and selfishness of men are perpetual.
Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions.
The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.
The nature of business is swindling.
The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.
And let no government imagine, that, to strip them of the power of defrauding their subjects, is to deprive them of a valuable privilege. A system of swindling can never be long lived, and must infallibly in the end produce much more loss than profit.
Every swindle is driven by a desire for easy money;
it's the one thing the swindler and the swindled have in common.
If a white man had land, and some one should swindle him, that man would try to get it back, and you would not blame him.
If there are atheists, who is to be blamed if not the mercenary tyrants of souls who, in revolting us against their swindles, compel some feeble spirits to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?
What changed these very ordinary men (who were such cowards that they did not dare stand too near the cross in case they got involved) into heroes who would stop at nothing? A swindle? Hallucination? Spooky nonsense in a darkened room? Or Somebody quietly doing what He said He'd do - walk right through death? What do you think?
Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles.
Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism -- robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.
The State always stands for swindling, intrigue, and privilege, and cannot stand for anything else.
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.
The mere leader of fashion has no genuine claim to supremacy;
at least, no abiding assurance of it. He has embroidered his title upon his waistcoat, and carries his worth in his watch chain; and, if he is allowed any real precedence for this it is almost a moral swindle,--a way of obtaining goods under false pretences.
It is poison - rank poison - to knuckle down to care and hardships.
They must come to us all, albeit in different shapes, and we may not escape them. It is not possible. But we may swindle them out of half of their puissance with a stiff upper lip.
The inclination to self-depreciation, to freely accepting being robbed, being duped, and being swindled, could be the modesty of a god among men.
With a woman, always make good use of a secret.
She will be proportionally grateful to you, like a scoundrel who grants his respect to an honest man he has been unable to swindle.
Everything ends this way in France — everything.
Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs — everything is a pretext for a good dinner.
Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.
It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.
Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?
When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.
The promises of higher education and previously enviable credentials have turned into the swindle of fulfillment.
Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.
And what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and always will be.
The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle. If Enron executives had shouted, "Head for the hills!" the employees might have had time to sucker other Americans into buying wildly over-inflated Enron stock. Just because your boss is a criminal doesn't make you a hero.
They've been changing the cry from "global warming" to "climate change" because there's so little evidence there's actually any warming going on. I believe that as little as a decade from now, global warming will be recognized as one of the greatest swindles in world history. It has so little scientific basis, it can only rationally be considered a political scam.
By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit become the most effective means of driving captialist production beyond its own limits and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.
People in my industry [PR] would like people to believe we have ways to control social media. But that's one of the great swindles.