Shell Game Quotes & Sayings

The drum-fire of propaganda that the Fed is manning the ramparts against the menace of inflation brought about by others is nothing less than a deceptive shell game. The culprit solely responsible for inflation, the Federal Reserve, is continually engaged in raising a hue-and-cry about 'inflation,' for which virtually everyone else in society seems to be responsible. What we are seeing is the old ploy by the robber who starts shouting 'Stop, thief!' and runs down the street pointing ahead at others. — Murray Rothbard

Also not the kind of place to hide a server."
"Is that another pun?" She asked.
"No! I swear! I didn't mean that one."

~Shell Game, Kingdom Keepers #5 — Ridley Pearson

What you discover about life's shell game is that it's hardest to follow the pea when you're the pea. — Robert Breault

I think I need to spend some time with safari but what arrests my attention are salient, sadomasochism, saccadic, and salad days. I think I will go learn more about coral only to learn a lot more about corollary and counterturn and coffin nail. I go from magnificence to means to marquee to maniac to distyle, ductile, hindsight, shell game, veronica, yardstick, ball field, magpie, variegated, and close shave. — Dara Wier

We're in a battle for our lives for things that really matter to us. There's a shell game going on like I've never seen before. — John F. Kerry

If you take away the fancy graphics of today's games, most of the time you're left with a shell of a game that has been done to death a million times. — Herman Leonard

That's the thing about marriage. It's a shell game we play with ourselves. We're the suckers and we have to lose, but we play anyway because we lie to ourselves that we can win. — R. K. Milholland

Laws governing pollution tend to move pollutants from one medium to another. So, for example, we scrub SO2 from power plants only to dispose toxic sludge on land. We "clean" water only to disperse toxic-laced solids on farmland or landfills. Pollution control becomes a kind of giant shell game by which we move pollutants between air, water, groundwater, and land. — David W. Orr

The other [video game] franchises let you experience the adrenaline and horror of war, or deep fantasy worlds, or pro sports. A Mario game lets you pretend to be a middle-aged chubster hopping onto a turtle shell. — Jeff Ryan

Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed. — Terence McKenna

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible. — Elliot Richardson

I have simply given up a longevity which I never possessed anyhow. I have turned away from the con game which the gods run in their heavenly side-show. I no longer care under which shell the pea of immortality might be found. I don't need it. I have my moment which is quite enough. — Robert Sheckley

I'm a bit surprised that the Raiders turned to Art Shell to be their new head coach, not because Shell isn't a good head coach - he had success before as the Raiders' head coach - but because he's been away from the game so long and the game has changed a lot in those years. — Ron Jaworski

It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by those receipts. — Murray Rothbard

I could be stranded in any town in the United States with ten cents and within an hour make $20 with the shell game. — W.C. Fields

But no matter whether we are all in a still greater game, this one here before us is at a cruder grain than that which it models. Entire battles, and sometimes therefore wars, can hinge on a jammed gun, a failed battery, a single shell being dud or an individual soldier suddenly turning and running, or throwing himself on a grenade." Hyrlis shook his head. "That cannot be fully modelled, not reliably, not consistently. That you need to play out in reality, or the most detailed simulation you have available, which is effectively the same thing. — Iain M. Banks

We reward people for making money off money, and moving money around and dividing up mortgages a thousand times over, selling it to China ... and it becomes this shell game. — Michael Moore

It is almost as if we are all playing a big game of hide-and-go-seek. We all hide expecting to be found, but no one has been labelled the seeker. We stand behind the wall, at first excited, then worried, then bored, then anxious, then angry. We hide and hide. After a while, the game is not fun anymore. Where is my seeker? Where is the person who is supposed to come find me here in my protected shell and cut me open? Where is that one who will make me trust him, make me comfortable, make me feel whole? Some people rot on the spot, waiting for the seeker that never comes. The most important truth that I can relate to you, if you are hiding and waiting, is that the seeker is you and the world, behind so many walls, awaits. — Vironika Tugaleva

It's the old shell game. — Dan Rather

Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty. — Lionel Shriver

The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate. — Richard P. Feynman

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful. — Sherwood Anderson

Subsidies are a shell game, not a net addition to national wealth. — Thomas Sowell

I was involved in Occupy Wall Street as a participant and poster artist. 'Shell Game' is an attempt to do something bigger, to use whatever artistic powers I have to explore the excitements and betrayals of that year. — Molly Crabapple

from The Prep Pantheon: An All-Time Great Alumni Association

Caroline Kennedy. Concord Academy '75. Harvard '80. On technical points Preppier than Mummy. During four years at Harvard Square, an unnatural fiber never went near her body (except for the shell of her L. L. Bean down vest). Her lacrosse game was ruthless, her brunch technique dazzling (smoked heavily, sat with the descendents of three other presidents). — Lisa Birnbach

He likes you, too." Finn repeated. "And don't tell me to shut up."
"Shut up!"
-Kingdom Keepers, Shell Game — Ridley Pearson

You got to harden yourself. Make, like, a shell around you. But not everyone can do it. If they got nothing to hang on to some of them screw up. They're not in the game no more. — Charlie Higson

I realized we'd pulled into a parking garage. We drove around two levels, pulled into a spot, then immediately pulled out again. Along with four other black Bentley SUVs.
"What's going on?" I asked, as we headed back toward the exit with two Bentleys in front of us and two behind us.
"Shell game," he said ... — Sylvia Day

In school, they would tell you that life wouldn't come to you; you had to go out and make it your own. But when it came to love, the message for girls seemed to be this: Don't. Don't go after what you want. Wait. Wait to be chosen, as if only in the eye of another could one truly find value. The message was confusing and infuriating. It was a shell game with no actual pea under the rapidly moving cups. — Libba Bray