“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s how the smart money bets.”–Damon Runyon Like most really good quotations, Damon Runyon’s memorable reworking of Ecclesiastes 9:11 exists in a bunch of different versions. It’s one of my favorites in the cynical, wised-up style, taking an original bubble of sentiment that basically says, “You can do anything!” and puncturing it with a jab of common sense. Runyon was a sportswriter and a lifelong gambler, so his use of “smart money” was no accident. The slightly shady characters he wrote about–the ones that...
