fraud

She would talk to him in the car, ask him something, then turn on the radio and find her question answered by the lyrics of a song; pick up a book and turn to a random page, to find the words that were exactly what she needed to hear. There is no such thing as coincidence, she would think, blowing a kiss of thanks to the heavens.

People show you who they are, not by what they say, but by what they do.

You discover something so awful, so life-changing, the only way you can cope is to jump straight into denial.

Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....

Month to month there were many discrepancies carried forward without resolution through what I jokingly called my _999 (or Nick Leeson)_ account.

Shock doesn't hit all at once. I have learned.

People who mock incidents in history such as 9/11 or the Holocaust, referring to it all as a hoax or stirring up crazy conspiracy theories about it, should really stop and think about their words first, both because it shows flaws in logic and rationality to deny the obvious, and because to play pretend with incidents which killed innocent people, well, that's just like laughing in the face of tragedy. It's as if to say, "no, it's not horrible enough that these people were killed, oh no, we have to drag on these incidents by indulging in melodramatic fantasies!" In essence this means that those who lost loved ones not only have to live with these losses forever, they also have to live with the people who deny that any of it ever happened. It does no good to forget history or to deny it. All it does is desensitize people; it tells them that it's all just a game, which then risks the possibility of nobody taking it seriously enough to prevent something similar from happening again.

Both [P. T.] Barnum and H. L. Mencken are said to have made the depressing observation that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The remark has worldwide application. But the lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.

If you lay with a scorpion, don't be surprised when it finally stings you.

Accepting fraud from our leaders means accepting fraud in our personal lives.

Truth is hard, propaganda is cheap.

When you're dealing with frauds and liars, listen more to what they don't say than what they do.

Leadership by deception isn't leadership. It's fraud.

It has been my personal experience that the government engages in a wide range of frauds with the common people.

An electrical utility company that blatantly lies to law enforcement about an electrical fraud researcher would be considered suicidal by many people.

When the police willfully break the law on video and then deny the event in writing, you know that you are dealing with a blatantly corrupt group of people.

What is fear but that __hing_ that we believed to be as powerful as it pretended to be.

When you've grown up mis-educated, surrounded by fear and hate, unaware of your privilege, lies can sound like the truth.