Quotes from David G. Schwartz

The gambling impulse even predates humanity: A variety of animals, from bees to primates, embrace risk for a chance at reward. A 2005 Duke University study found that macaque monkeys preferred to follow a "riskier" target, which gave them varying amounts of juice, over a "safe" one, which always gave the same—they just like gambling.

The invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago triggered a revolution in human living that would ultimately lead to cities, commerce, and money—and a dramatic expansion in gambling.

The Egyptians claimed the god Thoth (usually depicted as an ibis-headed man or dog-faced baboon) invented gambling.

Petrarch warned that "what you won, a thousand will wrest from you here and there; what you lose, no one will give back to you." Even when a winner, he reasoned, the gambler did not truly profit.

Petrarch declared that all money was unstable, whirling away "possibly due to the roundness of the coins," further elaborating that money won by gambling was the least stable of all.

In the first half of the second millennium A.D., a revolutionary form of gambling swept across Asia and Europe. Allowing for infinitely more variation than dice games, capable of artistic embellishment and even educational lessons, playing cards would supplant dice as the favored gambling mechanism to most of the world.

Mahatma Gandhi claimed that betting was a more pernicious evil than drinking.

When Europeans "discovered" Australia in 1522, the native inhabitants had no recognizable gambling, but the gambling spirit has found a welcome home on the continent in the years since.

Gambling was so common throughout the mining frontier, from California to Montana, that dogfights, bearfights, and bearbaiting were rampant. One man even proclaimed his "killer duck" an interspecies champion and pitted it against all canine challengers.

It is no wonder that most who came to the goldfields in search of wealth returned home empty handed. Running a gambling house was the easiest way to mine for gold.