Sourced

• Gambling is risk-taking. It might be said the owner of a casino gambles, takes risks, but he has the odds in his favour, so that’s intelligent gambling. If I wanted to gamble, I’d buy the casino.
  • John Paul Getty. From his interview with Alan Whicker, as quoted in his book, Within Whicker’s World (1982)

• When you’re betting and you win, naturally you have that satisfaction, and the profit.
  • George Soros, From an interview with Niall Ferguson, in the Channel 4 television series, The Ascent of Money, broadcast on 22nd December 2008

• That the chance of gain is naturally over-valued, we may learn from the universal success of lotteries.
  • Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)

Unsourced

• Capitalism is the joy of gambling.
  • Anonymous

• [Gambling] is a way of throwing money down the toilet without people calling you insane.
  • Anonymous

• [Gambling] is the sure way of getting nothing for something.
  • Wilson Mizner

• The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
  • Ambrose Bierce

• The lottery: a tax on people who flunked math.
  • Monique Lloyd

• The lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
  • A bumper sticker

• There is nothing that wears out a fine face like the vigils of the card-table, and those cutting passions which naturally attend them. Hollow eyes, haggard looks and pale complexions are the natural indications.
  • Steele

• Games of chance are traps to catch school boy novices and gaping country squires, who begin with a guinea and end with a mortgage.
  • Cumberland

• All gaming, since it implies a desire to profit at the expense of another, involves a breach of the tenth commandment.
  • Whately

• There is but one good throw upon the dice, which is, to throw them away.
  • Chatfield

• I look upon every man as a suicide from the moment he takes the dice-box desperately in his hand; and all that follows in his fatal career from that time is only sharpening the dagger before he strikes it to his heart.
  • Cumberland

• It is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity and the father of mischief.
  • Washington

• The only man who makes money following the races is one who does it with a broom and shovel.
  • Elbert Hubbard

• Gambling is possibly the only human vice where you can probably never persuade the gambler to bet that he’ll give it up.
  • Franklin P. Jones

• A game of chance is a million to one.
  • Daniel Chan

• What the winner don't know, the gambler understands.
  • Heart, from the song, "Straight On"

• Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock, and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. if it doesn't go up, don't buy it.
  • Will Rogers