Weekend Words: Fraud
"Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent."
As the Republican party primary comes to New York, frontrunner Donald Trump has begun charging his party’s delegation selection process with fraud.
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.
—James Baldwin, “Just Above My Head”
Men seldom rise from low condition to high rank without employing either force or fraud, unless that rank should be attained either by gift or inheritance.
—Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses
Force, and fraud, are in war two cardinal virtues.
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
—Raymond Chandler
I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials . . . from Hell’s Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream
There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them.
—Charles Caleb Colton
May is a pious fraud of the almanac.
—James Russell Lowell, “Under the Willows”
A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles… Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: there it is not a fraud, but a miracle.
—George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.
—Mark Twain
I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land… I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
—Frederick Douglas, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas
It is the sex angle that sells stories, that makes news. give people scandal allied to sex and it appeals far more than any mere political chicanery or fraud.
—Agatha Christie, The Labours of Hercules
Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.
—Willem de Kooning
The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired.
—David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon”
Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail.
—Benito Mussolini
Draw the curtain, the fraud is over.
—Francois Rabelais
