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When a gambler picks up a pack of cards or a pair of dice, he feels as though he has reduced an unmanageable world to a finite, visible and comprehensive size.
ANNABEL DAVIS-GOFF, The Literary Companion to Gambling
Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Gambler
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
Avoid gaming. This is a vice which is productive of every possible evil; equally injurious to the morals and health of its votaries. It is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and father of mischief. It has been the ruin of many worthy families, the loss of many a man's honor, and the cause of Suicide. To all those who enter the lists, it is equally fascinating. The successful gamester pushes his good fortune, till it is overtaken by a reverse. The losing gamester, in hopes of retrieving past misfortunes, goes on from bad to worse, till grown desperate he pushes at everything and loses his all. In a word, few gain by this abominable practice, (the profit if any being diffused) while thousands are injured.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Bushrod Washington, Jan. 15, 1783
A number of moralists condemn lotteries and refuse to see anything noble in the passion of the ordinary gambler. They judge gambling as some atheists judge religion, by its excesses.
CHARLES LAMB, Essays of Elia
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
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
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
Many a man who goes to Las Vegas to get away from it all soon finds that Las Vegas gets it all away from him.
EVAN ESAR, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
Show me a gambler and I’ll show you a loser.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare. That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries.
FRANK CRANE, Four Minute Essays
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
A gambler plays even when the odds are immutable and against him.
LOU KRIEGER, More Hold'em Excellence
At the gambling table, there are no fathers and sons.
The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.
DENIS DIDEROT, Elements of Physiology
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