Gambling Quotes, Sayings, and Citations

• "The typical gambler might not really understand the probabilistic nuances of the wheel or the dice, but such things seem a bit more tractable than, say, trying to raise a child in this lunatic society of ours."

-Arthur S. Reber, The New Gambler 's Bible

• "In the queer mess of human destiny the determining factor is luck. For every important place in life there are many men of fairly equal capacities. Among them luck decides who shall accomplish the great work, who shall be crowned with laurel, and who shall fall back into silence and obscurity."
  
  -William E. Woodward

• Nine gamblers could not feed a single rooster.
  
  -Yugoslav proverb

• "Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit."
  
  -R. E. Shay

• "A gambler with a system must be, to a greater or lesser extent, insane."
  
  -George Augustus Sala (1828-95) English writer and journalist

• "Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing from something."
  
  -Wilson Mizner

• "I am sorry I have not learned to play cards. It is very useful in life. It generates kindness and consolidates society."
  
  -Samuel Johnson

• "In the case of an earthquake hitting Las Vegas, be sure to go straight to the keno lounge. Nothing ever gets hit there."
  
  -An anonymous casino boss

• "Remember this: The house doesn't beat the player. It just gives him the opportunity to beat himself."
  
  -Nicholas (Nick the Greek) Dandalos

• "You know what luck is? Luck is believing you're lucky...to hold front position in this rat-race you've got to believe you're lucky."
  
  -Stanley Kowalski, A Streetcar Named Desire

• "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."
  
  -Grantland Rice

• "Don't gamble the rent money or you'll land up sleeping on the park bench."
  
  -Capt. Summer Fun, Ret.

• "Blackjack is the only casino game an amateur can learn to play and at which he can definitely win."
  
  -Lawrence Revere, author, Playing Blackjack as a Business

• "Gambling is the future on the internet. You can only look at so many dirty pictures."
  
  -Simon Noble, an Austrian-based internet bookmaker

• "When we put 50 machines in, I consider them 50 more mousetraps. You have to have a mousetrap to catch a mouse."
  
  -Bob Stupak, former Las Vegas casino owner

• Noting his mother's visit to Las Vegas the weekend before she died. "She got to go to heaven four days early."
  
  -President Bill Clinton

• "A lottery is a salutary instrument and a tax…laid on the willing only, that is to say, on those who can risk the price of a ticket without sensible injury, for the possibility of a higher prize."
  
  -Thomas Jefferson

• "You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it."
  
  -Albert Einstein

• "A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to us than the 99 which we had to work for, and the money won at Faro or in the stock market snuggles into our hearts in the same way."
  
  -Mark Twain

• They were burying a high-roller in Las Vegas and a few of his gambling cronies were gathered grave side when the minister said; "Gus is merely sleeping." His best friend was heard muttering: "I've got a hundred that says he's dead."

• "Stop cheating!" the dealer told the card player.
  "I'm not!" claimed the player.
  "You must be," said the dealer. "That is not the hand that I dealt you."

• "Suckers have no business with money anyway."
  
  -Canada Bill Jones, Legendary Three-card Monte Dealer

• "Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry."
  
  -George Ade

• "At that point I ought to have gone away, but a strange sensation rose up in me, a sort of defiance of fate, a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it. I laid down the largest stake allowe-four thousand gulden-and lost it. Then, getting hot, I pulled out all I had left, staked it on the same number, and lost again, after which I walked away from the table as though I were stunned. I could not even grasp what had happened to me."
  
  -Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler

• "If I had the money and the drinking capacity, I'd probably live at a roulette table and let my life go to hell."
  
  -Michael Ventura

• "Baccarat is a game whereby the croupier gathers in money with a flexible sculling oar, then rakes it home. If I could have borrowed his oar I would have stayed."
  
  -Mark Twain

• I hope to break even this week. I need the money.
  
  -VETERAN LAS VEGAS GAMBLER

• The Wampanoag Tribe has a machine, and they say, "It's completely idiot proof." I told them they've got it all wrong. I want a machine that is "idiot friendly."
  
  Former Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld

• "The subject of gambling is all encompassing. It combines man's natural play instinct with his desire to know about his fate and his future."
  
  -Franz Rosenthal, Gambling in Islam (1975)

• "Why otherwise would that dignified fellow dressed like a banker be sitting at a machine murmuring; "Talk to me baby, I know you understand my needs."
  
  -Roger Fleming

• "Gambling is a principle inherent in nature."
  
  -Edmund Burke, House of Commons speech (1780)

• "If I lose today, I can look forward to winning tomorrow, and if I win today, I can expect to lose tomorrow. A sure thing is no fun."
  
  -Chico Marx

• "He had the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces."
  
  -Mark Twain

• "When I played pool I was like a good psychiatrist. I cured 'em of all their daydreams and delusions.
  
  -Minnesota Fats

• "My advice to the unborn is, don't be born with a gambling instinct unless you have a good sense of probabilities."
  
  Jack Dreyfus of Dreyfus Mutual Fund

• "I have always wondered if the results of the Versailles Conferences would have been different if Woodrow Wilson had been a poker player."
  
  -Clyde Brion Davis Quoted in A. D. Livingston, Poker Strategy and Winning Play

• In a bet there is a fool and a thief.
  
  -Proverb

• "Casinos and prostitutes have the same thing in common; they are both trying to screw you out of your money and send you home with a smile on you face."
  
  -VP Pappy

• "Look high, look low, and we see that gamblers actually form the majority of the world's inhabitants."
  
  -James Runciman, Side Lights (1893)

• "They gambled in the Garden of Eden, and they will again if there's another one."
  
  -Richard Albert Canfield

• "The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown."
  
  -Bernard Shaw

• "It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees."
  
  -Mario Puzo, Inside Las Vegas

• "I've learned the lesson that the worst thing that can happen to a gambler is to let his recent losses or wins knock him off keel emotionally."
  
  -Andrew Beyer

• "Judged by the dollars spent, gambling is now more popular in America than baseball, the movies, and Disneyland-combined."
  
  -Timothy L. O'Brien, Bad Bet (1998)

• "They (slot machines) sit there like young courtesans, promising pleasures undreamed of, your deepest desires fulfilled, all lusts satiated."
  
  -Frank Scoblete

• "Gambling itself will only end when human nature has changed completely and there are no more bets to win."
  
  -Harold S. Smith Sr., I Want to Quit Winners

• "The majority of casino players leave to much to chance when playing in a casino. To put it bluntly, they don't have a clue as to how to play."
  
  -Henry Tamburin, gambling author

• "They are the new breed of slot machine-colorful, fancy, exciting, wonderful...and deadly."
  
  -Frank Scoblete

• "One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds."
  
  -Dan Bennett

• "A dollar won is twice as sweet as a dollar earned."
  
  -Paul Newman, The Color of Money

• "My last piece of advice to the degenerate slot player who thinks he can beat the one-armed bandit consists of four little words: "It can't be done."
  
  -John Scarne

• "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

• "If you ain't just a little scared when you enter a casino, you are either very rich or you haven't studied the games enough."
  
  VP Pappy

• "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 (1867)

• "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 (1832)

• "Guessing has never been widely acclaimed as a good gambling strategy."
  
  -Dr. G

• "No wife can endure a gambling husband unless he is a steady winner."
  
  -Lord Dewar

• Something to moan out between grinding teeth after this political season. "Didn't I warn you-Huh-Didn't I tell you one of 'em was going to win!?? So now, what do we do?"
  
  -Jack Norris

• "Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways, women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one."
  
  -Pope John XXIII

• "With the perverse logic of a degenerate gambler he figured God was testing his faith."
  
  -Mario Puzo, Inside Las Vegas

• "The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble."
  
  -Michael Ondaatje, Running the Family

• "Your best chance to get a Royal Flush in a casino is in the bathroom."
  
  -VP Pappy (A crusty old sage that still roams the Green Felt Jungles in Detroit)

• "The racetrack is a place where windows clean people."
  
  -VP Pappy

• "If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?"
  
  -Stanislaw J. Lec

• "The smarter you play, the luckier you'll be."
  
  -Mark Pilarski

• "Gaming corrupts our disposition and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind."
  
  -Thomas Jefferson
  Accordingly, he kept meticulous records of his backgammon and card winnings.

• "I am now eased in my finances and replenished in my wardrobe."
  
  -Andrew Jackson after winning a horse race.

• "I love Vegas. God knows that I know how to find my way around the buffets in Las Vegas."
  
  -Rick Majerus, Utah Utes college basketball coach

• A problem gambler was urged by a counselor to take the 20-question test for compulsive gambling. Upon completing it, the subject commented; "Boy, Gamblers Anonymous must be hard up for new members. They make qualifying so easy."

• A Smith & Wesson beats four aces.
  
  -American Proverb

• "The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket."
  
  - Kin Hubbard

• "Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect."
  
  -Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• I hope to break even this week. I need the money.
  
  -VETERAN LAS VEGAS GAMBLER

• "Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a lifetime, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her."
  
  -Mark Twain

• "The only difference between a winner and a loser is character."
  
  - Nick the Greek

• "It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck."
  
  - Joseph Conrad

• "We got an education when in 1992 Wolfgang Puck opened Spago in the Forum Shops in Caesars Palace and proved to us that people will line up to get good food."
  
  -Steve Wynn

• "But, Steve, if you bring back a $3.49 prime rib buffet, you'll have lines out the casino front door and down Las Vegas Blvd."
  
  -Mark Pilarski

• This quote crossed my desk this week from a reader. Those of you with the same passion and affliction for betting motor sports as I might enjoy it.
  "Race fans, I had inferred from my one trip to the Brickyard 400, fell into one of two categories: tattooed, shirtless, sewer-mouthed drunks, and their husbands."
  
  - Steve Ruchin, Sports Illustrated

• "I believe in luck. How else can you explain the success of those you dislike?"
  
  -Jean Cocteau

• In Atlantic City, N.J., elderly gamblers got flu shots Monday at Bally's Park Place ballroom while slot machines jangled in the next room. Nurses said the shot could cause soreness in their arms, but many replied they would work it out by pulling the slot machine handle.

• "Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science."
  
  - Henry David Thoreau

• "Son, we are sorry about the tuition funds...your mother and I did not know you are not supposed to split tens..."

-Letters home from people visiting Reno.

• "Nobody is always a winner, and anybody who says he is, is either a liar or doesn't play poker."
  
  -Amarillo Slim

• "The best bet you get is an even break."
  
  -Franklin Pierce Adams

• "Better an ounce of luck than a pound of gold."

- Yiddish Proverb

• "Throw a lucky man in the sea, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth."

- Arab Proverb

• "Luck never gives; it only lends."

- Proverb

• "Luck sometimes visits a fool, but it never sits down with him."

- German Proverb

• "No gulls, no luck."

- French Proverb

• "Every dog has his day in luck."

- Japanese Proverb

• "Go and wake up your luck."

- Persian Proverb

• "When God throws the dice are loaded."

- Greek Proverb

• "No one is luckier than him who believes in his luck"

- German proverb

• "Luck never made a man wise."

- Seneca

• "Luck affects everything; let your hook always be cast. In the stream where you least expect it, there will be fish."

- Ovid

• "If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?"

- Stanislaw J. Lec

• "Men of action are favored by the Goddess of luck."

- George S. Clason

• "Do you feel lucky?"

- Clint Eastwood

• "Good luck has its storms."

- George Lucas

• "I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?"

- Jean Cocteau

• "Diligence is the mother of good luck."

- Benjamin Franklin

• "Men have made an idol of luck as an excuse for their own thoughtlessness."

- Democritus

• "Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "The champion makes his own luck."

- Red Blaik

• "A little government and a little luck are necessary in life; but only a fool trusts either of them."

- P.J. O'Rourke

• "Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck."

- Orson Welles

• "Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men."

- E.B. White

• "Shallow men believe in luck."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get."

- Ray Kroc

• "I believe in luck. The harder I work the luckier I get."

- Sam Shoen

• "All of us have bad luck and good luck. The man who persists through the bad luck -- who keeps right on going -- is the man who is there when the good luck comes -- and is ready to receive it."

- Robert Collier

• "Everything in life is luck."

- Donald Trump

• "There is no such thing as luck."

- from "Star Wars"

• "Luck's always to blame."

- Jean de la Fontaine

• "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."

- President Thomas Jefferson

• "Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit."

- R. E. Shay

• "The only sure thing about luck is that it will change."

- Wilson Mizner

• "Luck is not a factor."

- Lindsay Brigman from "The Abyss" (1989)

• "Fortune favours the bold."

- Terence 190-159 BC

• "Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered."

- William Shakespeare

• "Good luck needs no explanation."

- Shirley Temple Black

• "God does not play dice with the universe"

- Albert Einstein

• "Luck is not chance - It's Toil - Fortune's expensive smile - Is earned"

- Emily Dickinson

• "Fortune always will confer an aura - Of worth, unworthily; and in this world - The lucky person passes for a genius."

- Euripedes

• "Some folk want their luck buttered."

- Thomas Hardy

Quotes, Sayings, and Citations by Gamblers

• "Most casino patrons view gambling as a mix of witchery, mysticism, entertainment and dumb luck. Very few view it the deadly game that it is."

-VP Pappy

• "A gambler never makes the same mistake twice. It's usually three or more times."
  
  -VP Pappy

• "Gambling is not about how well you play the games, it's really about how well you handle your money."
  
  -VP Pappy

• "Show me a wealthy gambler and I'll show you someone who has made his money from something other than gambling."
  
  -VP Pappy