Top 694 Ponzi Scheme Quotes & Sayings

Even if corners were cut, (Iran-Contra) was a brilliant scheme. There is no possibility that anyone in any Democratic administration would have gone to such lengths to fund anti-Communist forces. When Democrats scheme from the White House, it's to cover up the President's affair with an intern. When Republicans scheme, it's to support embattled anti-Communist freedom fighters sold out by the Democrats.

The federal government has made explicit and implicit promises to millions of people, but has put no money aside in order to keep those promises. Some of you may wonder where Bernie Madoff got the idea for his Ponzi scheme. Clearly he was studying federal entitlement policy.

The retirement age needs to be raised. A portion of Social Security ought to be privatized, if not all. And there probably needs to be some means testing. It's a Ponzi scheme that's not sustainable.

The Republican candidates are talking about ways to transition this program and it is a monstrous lie. It is a ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you're paying into a program that's going to be there. Anybody that's for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and it's not right.

There are tons of examples of U.K. and European mistakes. A classic one is pensions. That's obviously not an America-specific thing. The British and European economies are suffering under the weight of what is to come. The next great Ponzi scheme after Madoff is probably pensions.

The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.

The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end.

I don't want to subject myself just to one scheme. I think it's just if you can play, you can play no matter what scheme you play in.

Madoff's scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare.

A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity.

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries.

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that's just cluttered with spam, fake, digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers - a deception epidemic.

We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.

The economy is a ponzi scheme. People are working harder than they ever have for less wages, but we have so many bobbles because manufacturing has come up so quickly over the past hundred years that people have the illusion of wealth.

A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.

To insist on one's place in the scheme of things and to live up to that place.To empower others in their reaching for some place in the scheme of things.To do these things is to make fairy tales come true.

I'm scared of actors with a scheme.

The combination of Ponzi's huge personality and the enormous if brief success of his scheme, combined with the tremendous publicity which surrounded it, is ultimately what attached his name to it.

It’s hard to come up with a scheme to thwart some other scheme you don’t even know about.

You are a fantastic scheme of captivating ecstasy.

In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.

The welfare state may be well-intentioned, but it is a Ponzi scheme

The financial system as a whole has had the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme if we look at it fundamentally.

Capitalism is not a Ponzi scheme. Capitalism is a scheme of free markets.

The Old and New Testaments contain but one scheme of religion. Neither part of this scheme can be understood without the other.

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.

There is no quick way of making money. People come to you with tips for the races or offer the latest Ponzi scheme, but I can see them coming a mile off. I just go with the adage that if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

There is no such thing as compulsion in the scheme of nonviolence.

All of which is mostly bullshit. The reality is that it's just like any other Ponzi scheme: the guys at the top are doing pretty well, but the guys on the bottom are doing Amway pitches in trailer parks.

A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings.

The commission process in America and England is different. In America, they do it through an interview process, and it's really based on whether they like you or not. I mean, it's nothing to do with whether you do the best scheme or the worst scheme.

There is no need for an end to fish, or to fishing for that matter. But there is an urgent need for governments to free themselves from the fishing-industrial complex and its Ponzi scheme, to stop subsidizing the fishing-industrial complex and awarding it fishing rights, when it should in fact pay for the privilege to fish.

I know that plenty of folks have issues with Social Security, but I'd urge them to confront it on its own terms. Calling it a Ponzi scheme is misleading and does more to cloud the issue than it does to illuminate it. And yes, I do know that unless changes are made, the current system is unsustainable. But that doesn't mean it's fraud.

My only scheme was to be a rapper.

Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana is not a scheme that can be run by money. This scheme has to run with people's participation under the guidance of the MPs.

I believe the only reality is how we treat each other. The morality comes from the absence of any grander scheme, not from the presence of any grander scheme.

I am somewhat uncertain whether there is a definite factual question as to whether natural language handles truth-value gaps. Nor am I even quite sure that there is a definite question of fact as to whether natural language should be evaluated by the minimal fixed point or another, given the choice of a scheme for handling gaps. We are not at the moment searching for the correct scheme.

A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.

I have no grand scheme.

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

My favorite pre-Ponzi schemer was known as '520 Percent Miller' because he promised 10 percent returns a week, or 520 percent a year. Of course he was just using new investors' money to pay old investors, and soon he was on the lam.

Madoff Securities is the world's largest Ponzi scheme.

Washington treats Social Security like a Ponzi scheme.

Social security isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s not bankrupting us. It’s not an outrage. It is working.

The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who will in turn grow old and need even more young people, and so on ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.

To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

I trusted the wrong person with finances and the guy ended up breaking my bank. I lost my money in Ponzi schemes. If it wasn't enough to be wasting a lot of it, one of my best friends totally done me dirty and wiped me out.

People say it's a Ponzi scheme, it's a bubble. People really don't want to take it seriously. At some point, that narrative will shift to 'virtual currencies are here to stay.'

Now, Rahul Gandhi has offered Rs 72,000 per annum scheme to every poor person in India. It is a miracle scheme. While Modi failed to give Rs 15 lakh he promised to every poor person, Congress will fulfil its promise as it did earlier. That is why Rahul Gandhi is hero while Modi is zero.

I learnt to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.

If you, however, separate reason and faith so that it's purely a rationalistic scheme, it will end in violence. If a pure faith scheme - sometimes called the fundamentalist scheme in modern parlance - you'll end in violence too.

When running a Ponzi scheme, how does one avoid enormous, unexpected withdrawals - runs on the bank, so to speak - that would pull back the curtain and reveal a little man blowing smoke? One way would be to attract a core of investors who could be counted on to never withdraw more than a small percentage of principal each year.

I think that fact alone levels everything. Slapstick amazes me, the folly of humans today, the Ponzi schemes, giving birth to eight babies at once, it's amazing... And I know, it's horrible to have your money stolen and all that, but those are amazing stories.

No Ponzi schemer tells anyone exactly how it works. The purpose of a Ponzi scheme is to trick people, to take the money and run.

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.

If the American public were accurately polled, I suspect the results would find Bonnie & Clyde, Bill Clinton, Ponzi Scheme scamster Bernie Madoff, and the infamous Wily Coyoteto be believed to be more honest and trustworthy than Hillary Clinton.

Many state governments have launched innovative steps such as Ladli Laxmi scheme of Madhya Pradesh, PDS reform scheme of Chattisgarh, computerization of land records in Karnataka, free computers to students passing 10th standard exams, pollution control efforts in Himachal, power sector reforms in Rajasthan and Mumbai - Pune Expressway in Maharashta. These excellent innovative schemes are examples of good governance.