Nick Tosches Quotes

It's true that people will take advantage of you in Nigeria, but this happens everywhere in the world.

Nearly everyone who chooses to work for Donald Trump is disreputable in one way or another; Ali Baba didn't find 40 wise men in the cave. But to label everyone in Trumpworld a grifter misses important subtleties. It conflates grifters and grafters, and it ignores the crucial distinction between the two.

Every swindle is driven by a desire for easy money; it's the one thing the swindler and the swindled have in common.

The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

Dishonesty is so grasping it would deceive God himself, were it possible.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful.

There's a lot of conning as part of our society, I think.

To plunder, to lie, to show your ass, are the three essentials for climbing high.

If you do not know how to lie, cheat and steal, turn your attention to politics and learn.

It takes two to corrupt – the corrupted and the corrupter.

The cynical impudence with which the reformers have tried to manufacture an ideal statesman out of the late shady politician beats anything in novel-writing. They are making popular capital. They lie and maneuver just like candidates for office. The independents and reformers are as bad as the late lamented, and for the same reason. It pays.[

They lied, they cheated, they stole, they had the power to do it and they did.

Irony is the recourse of the weak-minded wimp, I think. I hate bands that deliver their songs with knowing smiles on their faces, so that if those songs fall flat they can say 'Ah well, we never really meant it anyway.' It's so dishonest.

My opinion is that he's a swindler and you're a sucker.

In Hollywood people lie to each other and cheat each other and then go and play tennis. But I don't want to be a tennis player.

It's hard finding people you trust or who aren't going to take your money. Everyone wants to get a piece of whatever you're doing. It's a nightmare.

What we have to do now is to make the public at large aware that what we're looking at is not a historical event but - and I have to be brutal and I am going to say it - a racket.

It's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.

Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.

When a fellow says, 'It ain't the money but the principle of the thing,' it's the money.

Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.

We will push those crooks, those mercenaries back into the swamp.