Quotes About Gambling

Asked about China, he marvels at its economic transformation, but laments that too many Chinese "like to gamble, and they actually believe in luck. Now, that is stupid. What you don't want to believe in is luck. You want to believe in odds.

If you still crave financial thrills or feel compelled to have exciting investments to talk about with folk at parties, then designate a very small corner of your portfolio as mad money, to be deployed in 'exciting' investments. Just make sure to promise yourself that when it's gone, it's gone.

I was shocked. A dying word, "shocked." Few people have been able to use it well since Claude Rains so famously said, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," as he pocketed his winnings in Casablanca. But it's the only word for excitement and alarm of this intensity.

When my mom pulled the trigger my dad had a full house, three fives and a pair of ducks. He was all in. The paper says although dead, he ended up winning seven grand. I once heard someone on tv say we die as we lived. That sounds about right.

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 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.

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.

God's dice always have a lucky roll.

You cannot get anything out of nature or from God by gambling; only out of your neighbor.

If I lose at play, I blaspheme; if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So, God is always the loser.

Keep your money in your pocket. Or bet it on a good horse.

Legalized gambling cost taxpayers $3 for every $1 in state revenue to government

The Chinese have always enjoyed gambling, and Macau is the only place in Greater China where gambling is legal. So I believe the government understands that there has to be a place for it.

It is lost at dice, what ancient honor won.

Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today's winners are tomorrow's blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope.

Hope! fortune's cheating lottery; when for one prize an hundred blanks there be!

In betting on races, there are two elements that are never lacking - hope as hope, and an incomplete recollection of the past.

Blessed be the slot players for theirs is the hope of a better day dawning.

We have a swarm of people in the stock market - not out of knowledge, not out of expectation, but out of basically a gambling instinct, the hope that prices will go up.