A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their confidence. A confidence artist is an individual operating alone or in concert with others who exploits characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty, honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, naïveté or greed.
Read more about Confidence Trick: Terminology, History, Vulnerability To Confidence Tricks
Famous quotes containing the words confidence trick, confidence and/or trick:
“The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)