Edwin Lefevre Quotes

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

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

In the end, I didn't get a dime of the money I was shortchanged.

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

You set me up," I say. "One big con. You can't blame me because I turned out not to be gullible enough. You can't blame the mark. That's not how it works. Have some respect for the nature of the game.

Commerce is the school of cheating.

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

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

I am in no mood to be deceived any longer by the crafty devil and false character whose greatest pleasure is to take advantage of everyone.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

And I think it's because good cons are all based on the victim's need, and the successful con artist is the one, I guess, who can exploit that. I remember reading something about this, that one of the great traits of confidence tricksters is the level that they flatter their victim.

This is the ultimate con game - I'm having fun and people pay me to do it.

Life is a racket. Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything's a racket.

But human nature dictates that there will always be cheaters. That's inevitable. Where there's money involved and glory, there are going to be people that cheat, and there will always be ways to cheat.

The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and their own gullibility, and they tend to just quietly go away.

It doesn't matter how rich you are - you know when you're being ripped off.

There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them.

I believe we have been fleeced.

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

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

Is there any way we can screw him?

One of the things about the con artist lifestyle is that all the romance is sort of sloppy and fast and loose.

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

I know every trick in the book, in terms of schemes and fraud.

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.