Michael A. Stackpole Quotes

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

I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.

I’ve been a con artist since I was 16 and trying to get my dad to buy me a car. I never succeeded, but I learnt a lot of tactics.

We can all be conned but at what point do we realize that we're being conned and to what point do we allow ourselves to be conned?

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

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

I've been fooling the public for years and I'm really good at it.

Great liars are also great magicians.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

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

Hey, I fool the camera. I'm a liar, a magician.

The con movie is a little bit different where maybe we tell you what we're going to do but it never goes down the way you expect because there's so much double-crossing and cheats and lies going on along the whole way.

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

Cunning leads to knavery. It is but a step from one to the other, and that very slippery. Only lying makes the difference; add that to cunning, and it is knavery.

A successful swindler has to be a great salesman even more than a great actor.

No Ponzi schemer tells anyone exactly how it works. The purpose of a Ponzi scheme is to trick people, to take the money and run.

This is very clever. They have created a system to cheat.

People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.

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

You can fool some of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. That’s usually enough.

We may employ artifice to deceive a rival, anything against our enemies.

Business – the world's work – is the sale of lies

I believe that trying to deal with Donald Trump is like trying to play three-card monte in Central Park: it's not going to work out.

I'm a blagger by trade.

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