Global Language and World Culture
Quotations on Bets and Gambling

Quotations on Bets and Gambling

Trading versus Gambling, a serious challenge
Trading versus Gambling, a serious challenge

Life is nothing but a bet that in the end everyone is doomed to lose. So you’d better get used! Carl William Brown

Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other. Charles Lamb

Trading is more or less like betting or gambling, but only without the pleasure show of the game.
Carl William Brown

It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of stock exchanges.
John Maynard Keynes

Trading is more or less like betting or gambling, but only without the pleasure show of the game.
Carl William Brown

Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.
From the movie The Color of Money

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

For most men (till by losing rendered sager) Will back their own opinions by a wager.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Beppo”

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

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

The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet. ~Damon Runyon, “More Than Somewhat,” in reference to Ecclesiastes 9:11, “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

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

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

Someone once asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
Gloria Steinem

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

No wife can endure a gambling husband, unless he is a steady winner.
Thomas Robert Dewar

The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice is so pleasurable, that I assume it must be evil.
Heywood Broun

If you must play, decide upon three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.
Chinese Proverb

There is a very easy way to return from a casino with a small fortune: go there with a large one.
Jack Yelton

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

In most betting shops you will see three windows marked “Bet Here,” but only one window with the legend “Pay Out.”
Jeffrey Bernard

A gambler is nothing but a man who makes his living out of hope.
William Bolitho

I met with an accident on the way to the track; I arrived safely.
Joe E. Lewis

In the case of an earthquake hitting Las Vegas, be sure to go straight to the Keno Lounge. Nothing ever gets hit there.
Author Unknown

Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.
Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, 1823

If you don’t like trading, gambling and betting, then you don’t like living.
Carl William Brown

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

The house doesn’t beat the player. It just gives him the opportunity to beat himself.
Nick Dandalos

Dear Lord, help me to break even. I need the money.
Author Unknown

A race track is a place where windows clean people.
Danny Thomas

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

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

Luck never gives; it only lends.
Swedish Proverb

By gaming we lose both our time and treasure – two things most precious to the life of man.
Owen Felltham

At the gambling table, there are no fathers and sons.
Chinese Proverb

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
Author Unknown

You know horses are smarter than people. You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people.
Will Rogers

No dog can go as fast as the money you bet on him.
Bud Flanagan

Horse racing is animated roulette.
Roger Kahn

I bet on a horse at ten-to-one. It didn’t come in until half-past five.
Henny Youngman

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

A racehorse is an animal that can take several thousand people for a ride at the same time.
Author Unknown

The better the gambler, the worse the man.
Publius Syrus

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

There is but one good throw upon the dice, which is, to throw them away.
Author Unknown

Games of chance are traps to catch school boy novies and gaping country squires, who begin with a guinea and end with a mortgage.
Author Unknown

Betting is the manure to which the enormous crop of horse-races and racehorse breeding in this and other countries is to a large extent due.
Richard Blackmore, The Jockey Club and its Founders, 1891

Horse sense is a good judgment which keeps horses from betting on people.
W.C. Fields

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
Ambrose Bierce

A bookie is just a pickpocket who lets you use your own hands.
Henry Morgan

A racetrack is a place where windows clean people.
Danny Thomas

After one of them has won the Kentucky Derby, any breeding expert can sit down and show you just why he won – from his pedigree. The only trouble is, the expert can’t do it before the race.
Phil Chinn

Any money I put on a horse is a sort of insurance policy to prevent it from winning.
Frank Richardson

Fortunately my wife is understanding. When I come home from the races she never asks any questions, if I tell her I just ate a $380 hot dog.
Tim Conway

Horse sense is what keeps horses from betting on what people will do.
Raymond Nash

I am not one of the people who believe that the main reason why a chap becomes a bookmaker is because he is too scared to steal and too heavy to become a jockey.
Noel Whitcombe

I understand it is 13-8 against Egon Ronay publishing a Good Betting Shop Food Guide by 1997.
Clement Freud

I wouldn’t bet on a horse unless he came up to my house and told me to himself.
Eubie Blake (1975)

If in the paddock the owner is surrounded by a herd of young children, don’t back his horse. But if the owner is accompanied by a beautiful lady, plunge to the hilt.
Robert Morley

In betting on races, there are two elements that are never lacking – hope as hope, and an incomplete recollection of the past.
Edward V. Lucas (1951)

In most betting shops you will see three windows marked ‘Bet Here’, but only one window with the legend ‘Pay Out”
Jeffrey Bernard

It’s one thing to ask your bank manager for an overdraft to buy 500 begonias for the borders in Haslemere, but quite another to seek financial succour to avail oneself of the 5-2 they’re offering on lie de Bourbon for the St Leger.
Jeffrey Bernard (1978)

Losers walking around with money in their pockets are always dangerous, not to be trusted. Some horse always reaches out and grabs them.
Bill Barich

No one has ever bet enough on a winning horse.
Richard Sasuly

Remember, Lady Godiva put all she had on a horse and she lost her shirt!
W. C. Fields

The horse I bet on Came in so late, that it had to tiptoe into the barn not to wake the other horses.
Anon

The horse I bet on Had.four legs and flies – unfortunately it was a dead horse
Anon

The only exercise I get is walking to the betting office.
Peter O’Sullevan Daily Telegraph (1994)

The reason Con loses at the races, while he always wins at cards, is that he can’t shuffle the horses!
The Jockey Who Laughs

They head the list of bad to bet on: But I insist they’re worse to get on
Richard Armour