Gambling Quotes

I've just re-read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator and liked these quotes from Edwin Lefevre about GAMBLING:

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Chapter 1
And you ought to have heard my mother. You'd have thought that ten thousand dollars in cash was more than anybody carried around except old John D., and she used to tell me to be satisfied and go into some regular business. I had a hard time convincing her that I was not gambling, but making money by figuring. But all she could see was that ten thousand dollars was a lot of money and all I could see was more margin.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Chapter 5
Yet, I can see now that my main trouble was my failure to grasp the vital difference between stock gambling and stock speculation.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Chapter 7
Much depends upon beginning at exactly the right time. It took me years to realize the importance of this. It also cost me some hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't mean to be understood as advising persistent pyramiding. A man can pyramid and make big money that he couldn't make if he didn't pyramid; of course. But what I meant to say was this: Suppose a man's line is five hundred shares of stock. I say that he ought not to buy it all at once; not if he is speculating. If he is merely gambling the only advice I have to give him is, don't!

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Chapter 15
I have always thought that my coffee deal was the most legitimate of all my trades in commodities. I considered it more of an investment than a speculation. I was in it over a year. If there was any gambling it was done by the patriotic roasters with German names and ancestry. They had coffee in Brazil and they sold it to me in New York. The Price Fixing Committee fixed
the price of the only commodity that had not advanced. They protected the public against profiteering before it started, but not against the inevitable higher prices that followed.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Chapter 16
By rights the promoters ought to have got stuck with it, but in the wild bull market their hoggishness turned out to be rank conservatism. The public was buying anything that was adequately tipped. Investments were not wanted. The demand was for easy money; for the sure gambling profit. Gold was pouring into this country through the huge purchases of war material. They tell me that the promoters, while making their plans for bringing out Borneo stock, marked up the opening price three different times before their first transaction was officially recorded for the benefit of the public.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Chapter 19
The sucker has always tried to get something for nothing, and the appeal in all booms is always frankly to the gambling instinct aroused by cupidity and spurred by a pervasive prosperity. People who look for easy money invariably pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this sordid earth.