Where the grifter is shameless, the grafter shrinks from exposure, which could only endanger the racket. He is greedy but not creatively ambitious. He toils in mundane self-dealing, insider trading, bribe taking, witness tampering, and other forms of workaday corruption. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
Nearly everyone who chooses to work for Donald Trump is disreputable in one way or another; Ali Baba didn’t find 40 wise men in the cave. But to label everyone in Trumpworld a grifter misses important subtleties. It conflates grifters and grafters, and it ignores the crucial distinction between the two. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
To describe Peter Thiel as simply a libertarian wildly understates the case. His belief system is based on unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
Raised in a house filled with old books, I’m drawn to them: the dust jackets that call out a historical moment, the marbled boards, the words pressed into the page with movable type. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
Despite all the Internet has done to make prices transparent and bibliographic information universal, you can still find – at book sales and thrift shops, auctions and even fancy dealers – unrecognized or underpriced rarities. Getting something valuable for cheap is the basic, greedy thrill of book collecting. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
Political assumptions can remain constant for long periods and then change very quickly. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
Paternalism is the method of government activism most amenable to an impoverished public sector. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
It’s tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
For the grifter, ripping people off is seldom the point. The grifter is an artiste who invests in the long con. Jacob Weisberg Read Quote
