Con Men Quotes

“Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered.”
― Victor J. Stenger

“What you need to remember, with these guys, is that they don't know they're con men. They're wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience--that's part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces....Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn't know how to do, and not even realize he's bullshitting about his own capabilities. It's a special kind of gullibility....”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“The code of the con is to know just enough about everything so you can lie about anything.

(attrib: E. Tancarville)”
― Dan Garfat-Pratt, Citations: A Brief Anthology

“He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who'd been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“As for quackery and mountebanks, of which the town was so full, I listened to none of them, and have observed often since, with some wonder, that for two years after the plague I scarcely saw or heard of one of them about town. Some fancied they were all swept away in the infection to a man, and were for calling it a particular mark of God’s vengeance upon them for leading the poor people into the pit of destruction, merely for the lice of a little money they got by them; but I cannot go that length neither. That abundance of them died is certain; many of them came within the reach of my own knowledge; but that all of them were swept off I much question. I believe rather they fled into the country, and tried their practices upon the people there, who were in apprehension of the infection before it came among them.”
― Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

“Concerning the narcissist- after having been so seemingly incredibly loving and gentle, compassionate and caring- it would be like a light switch had suddenly been turned off and “all of a sudden” they simply did not care. They turned into a cold person, someone without love, compassion, empathy or regard for the subject’s feelings what so ever. It’s like they suddenly and literally stopped being human.”
― Jacqueline Servantess, The Other Woman: Based On A True Story • Helping To Protect Young Women From Narcissist Married Men

“He came up with a plan to trick the townspeople, who by now were so desperately afraid of the world around them that they would believe anything.”
― Kevin Cripe, The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf: The Complete Story