“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

“...he was forty bushels beyond bamboozled.”

“Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us --- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.”

“It is well-known what a middleman is; he is a man who bamboozles one party and plunders the other.”

“There’s something insupportable about being pissed with the one person on this planet that sends your adrenaline flowing to remind you that you’re alive. It’s almost like we’re mad because we’ve been shocked out of our usual comatose state of being by feeling something for someone, for ourselves, for just a moment.”

“No, Nick. The world has always been scary. You’ve just been lucky enough to be shielded from it. It’s the saddest part of childhood, really. When that shimmery veil is ripped away by something horrible and you’re left with the unvarnished truth. When the world no longer becomes safe and you see the ugly side of it. You, like most humans, fear us demons. But we’re not the worst predators out there. You know what we are. It’s the ones who lure you in with kindness or who attack from the back. Those are monsters far worse than us. All this time, you thought you know. We all do. But now you have seen.” – Caleb”