Cons

It’s Day One. Scary times ahead of us with the Grifter in Chief. He started the new year unsurprisingly, referring to those of us who are opposed to his presidency as enemies. Yeah, how long before his white supremacist, gun humping, used douchebag brained followers start picking us off? You know, because FREEDUMB or some such.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
~ Isaac Asimov, Foundation

Grifter's got an irrisistable urge to be the guy who is wise. It's nothing to whipping a fool. Hell, fools are made to be whipped. But to take another pro, even your partner who knows you and has his eye on you, THAT'S a score.
~ Myra (Annette Bening) The Grifters

Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered.
~ Victor J. Stenger

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
~ George Orwell

He was his own victim, his own slave. He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self.
~ Jim Thompson, The Grifters

If you wear a mask for too long, there will come a time when you can not remove it without removing your face.
~ Matshona Dhliwayo

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
~ Noam Chomsky

An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

You can't talk about fucking in America, people say you're dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that's cool.
~ Richard Pryor

The code of the con is to know just enough about everything so you can lie about anything.
~ Dan Garfat-Pratt, Citations: A Brief Anthology

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.
~ Alfred Molina

What you need to remember, with these guys, is that they don't know they're con men. They're wildly overconfident.
~ William Gibson, Zero History

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.
~ Walter Kirn

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.
~ Timothy Noah

And now, with all branches controlled by grifters whose only job, as they seem to see it, is to line the pockets of the über-wealthy (themselves included, of course!), it is.