It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.

Recurrent speculative insanity and the associated financial deprivation and larger devastation are, i am persuaded, inherent in the system. Perhaps it is better that this be recognized and accepted.

Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.

Your faith in <i>Homo technologicus</i> -the Tinkering Man- has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause.

He’d calloused his mind plenty, but because his foundation was cracked, when shit got real he lost control of his mindset and became a slave to his self doubt.

"Burke has truly said that "the human system which rests for its basis on the heroic virtues is sure to have a superstructure of weakness or of profligacy.

I used to be a heavy gambler. But now I just make mental bets. That's how I lost my mind.

...the look of a man who had made the devil's bargain and knew he had lost.

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.

"He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!" — the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved."

faith without doubt is addiction

The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.

He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

Yes, I can understand that a man might go to gambling table - when he sees that all that lies between himself and death is his last crown