quotations about gambling
Casinos ... know that chips are a wonderful, pretty tool, and possess none of the stigma of dollars. Dollars translate too easily into hours or houses or cars or sex or food or everything, and so losing a dollar is a much more tangible experience than parting with a chip, an object that looks more like a midway consolation token than a medium of exchange.
JOHN O'BRIEN
Leaving Las Vegas
The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.
JOAN DIDION
The White Album
I have a notion that gamblers are as happy as most people, being always excited; women, wine, fame, the table, even ambition, sate now & then, but every turn of the card & cast of the dice keeps the gambler alive.
LORD BYRON
Letters and Journals
When I was young, people called me a gambler. As the scale of my operations increased I became known as a speculator. Now I am called a banker. But I have been doing the same thing all the time.
ERNEST CASSEL
attributed, The Essential Gambler
Gambling-houses are temples where the most sordid and turbulent passions contend; there no spectator can be indifferent; a card or a small square of ivory interests more than the loss of an empire, or the ruin of an unoffending group of infants, and their nearest relatives.
JOHANN GEORG ZIMMERMAN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Man and Superman
There are two great pleasures in gambling: that of winning and that of losing.
FRENCH PROVERB
Horse racing is animated roulette.
ROGER KAHN
attributed, Sportswrit
His hands become nervous when he picks up the cards, exactly as if he were holding live birds instead of inanimate pieces of cardboard.
MAXIM GORKY
attributed, The Little Red Book of Gambling Wisdom
In his gambling, he had one besetting weakness -- faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain.
JACK LONDON
The Call of the Wild
A dollar won is twice as sweet as a dollar earned.
PAUL NEWMAN
The Color of Money
You don't gamble to win. You gamble so you can gamble the next day.
BERT AMBROSE
attributed, The Essential Gambler
The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.
DAMON RUNYON
attributed, And I Quote
There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors. The secret is this: people gamble to LOSE money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It's a sacrifice, of sorts.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
There is no such thing as "social gambling." Either you are there to cut the other bloke's heart out and eat it -- or you're a sucker.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Time Enough For Love
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Romans et contes philosophiques
In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The Conservator, May 1913
The highs of gambling are paid for by the lows, made possible by them. Sure, there are a few people who always seem to win at games of chance, like James Bond. But how much do they enjoy gambling? The joy of occasionally winning for most of us mortals comes from the thrill of risk and proximity to the precipice. The fact that we often fall makes so much more special those lovely floating moments when the tightrope across the chasm of losing feels miraculously wide and secure.
PAUL LYONS
The Little Red Book of Gambling Wisdom
A gambler plays even when the odds are immutable and against him.
LOU KRIEGER
More Hold'em Excellence
Gambling is the origin of more extensive misery than all other crimes put together; and the mischief falls principally on the unoffending and helpless; it leads, by insensible degrees, a greater number of wretches to the gallows than the higher atrocities from which that terminus is seen more plainly.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations