Where scarcity does not exist, it is invented.
Getting
You never find people endeavoring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune.
–Johnson
The royal road to wealth is not to make money but to capture it.
Many things work on a small scale and fail on a large one; crime is exactly the opposite.
To lie, cheat, and steal may be optimally adaptive, provided one maintains a reputation for never lying, cheating, or stealing.
To want your name known is innocuous, even healthy. To want your face known is when sickness sets in.
To tell the world how little success matters is one of the most delightful perquisites of success.
When one relative embezzles from another, it’s always the brother-in-law — just close enough for nepotism, just distant enough that he can’t be entirely trusted.
To engage in morally dubious activities on a small scale, you have to pay off the local politicians and police. On a large scale it becomes necessary to endow chairs at Harvard.
A noxious sales practice, which even street beggars have learned, is to precede the solicitation with a pleasantry, such as any well-meaning stranger might offer. Eventually one begins to dread all such pleasantries, as preludes to solicitation.
It is so much bother to steal money properly that one might as well earn it.