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Crackpots Quotes

Browse 42 quotes about Crackpots.

Crackpots Quotes

“Nothing is a masterpiece - a real masterpiece - till it's about two hundred years old. A picture is like a tree or a church, you've got to let it grow into a masterpiece. Same with a poem or a new religion. They begin as a lot of funny words. Nobody knows whether they're all nonsense or a gift from heaven. And the only people who think anything of 'em are a lot of cranks or crackpots, or poor devils who don't know enough to know anything. Look at Christianity. Just a lot of floating seeds to start with, all sorts of seeds. It was a long time before one of them grew into a tree big enough to kill the rest and keep the rain off. And it's only when the tree has been cut into planks and built into a house and the house has got pretty old and about fifty generations of ordinary lumpheads who don't know a work of art from a public convenience, have been knocking nails in the kitchen beams to hang hams on, and screwing hooks in the walls for whips and guns and photographs and calendars and measuring the children on the window frames and chopping out a new cupboard under the stairs to keep the cheese and murdering their wives in the back room and burying them under the cellar flags, that it begins even to feel like a religion. And when the whole place is full of dry rot and ghosts and old bones and the shelves are breaking down with old wormy books that no one could read if they tried, and the attic floors are bulging through the servants' ceilings with old trunks and top-boots and gasoliers and dressmaker's dummies and ball frocks and dolls-houses and pony saddles and blunderbusses and parrot cages and uniforms and love letters and jugs without handles and bridal pots decorated with forget-me-nots and a piece out at the bottom, that it grows into a real old faith, a masterpiece which people can really get something out of, each for himself. And then, of course, everybody keeps on saying that it ought to be pulled down at once, because it's an insanitary nuisance.”

ArtReligionChristianitySeedsPoemsNonsenseGhostsMasterpieceLove LettersCrackpotsGifts From HeavenCranksBlunderbussesDry RotInsanitary NuisancesJugs Without HandlesOld BonesParrot Cages
Book:THE HORSE'S MOUTH
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“Science may appear to have no connection with political freedom…. Scientists are too busy with positive measures, such as productive research and the dissemination of the results of the search for truth, to take time out to refute every crackpot notion that gets into print…. If the democratic process were applied ideally, and if enough people were to accept the claims in the article as truth, then publicly supported schools and universities could be depopulated of competent faculties, whose places could be taken by quacks and political appointees. Granted that the chance of this is very small, nevertheless the imagined situation has a modern precedent. Something very similar did happen (on purely political grounds) in a European country during several years preceding the second world war. It has happened in other countries since the end of that war.”

DemocracyPublic EducationPseudoscienceAnti IntellectualismCrackpots1950
Book:The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
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“The point is that we are among those who cannot get their mouths around all the little Yeses that add up to tacit acceptance of a world run by crackpot realists and subject to blind drift. And that, you see, is something to which we do belong; we belong to those who are still capable of personally rejecting. Our minds are not yet captive.”

WorldMindLittlesStillsRunningSubjectsAcceptanceCapableMouthsBlindAddRealistCaptivesRejectingTacitCrackpots
Book:C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings
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“Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave.”

PeopleHumansIndividualSocialHuman NatureTheoryBehaviorModelsEconomicsComplexesObservationLimitationBehaveRelyAbstractSubtleGroundedFree MarketRationalismSocial BehaviorCrackpots
Author:Ellen Willis
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“We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)”

WorldDependsSurvivalResourcesMachinesSlaveRateManageManagersEmployeeDependentEmpiresSpecialistsDevouringAbbeyCrackpots
Author:Edward Abbey
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“The only funny part about Colonial Dunsboro is maybe it's too authentic, but for all the wrong reasons. This whole crowd of losers and nutcases who hide out here because they can't make it in the real world, in real jobs — isn't this why we left England in the first place? To establish our own alternate reality. Weren't the Pilgrims pretty much the crackpots of their time? For sure, instead of just wanting to believe something different about God's love, the losers I work with want to find salvation through compulsive behaviors.”

WorldWantFirstsBelieveDifferentRealReasonWholeRealityJobsLeftBehaviorEnglandSalvationCrowdsLoserReal WorldGod's LovePilgrimReal JobsWrong ReasonsCrackpotsAlternate Realities
Author:Chuck Palahniuk
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“It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos. What it's going to be, I don't know. Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And maybe knowing isn't the point. Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.”

KnowsWorldTryingRealityNightDarkKnowingMiddleRocksRight NowStandingChaosRuinsOur TimeCreepyRushingPilgrimMiddle Of The NightMiddle Of NowhereCrackpotsAlternate RealitiesRushing Around
Author:Chuck Palahniuk
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“God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality.”

LooksPersonsIdeasCharacterSeemsSpiritualOrderPersonalityPerformancesSacredNotionIndividualityBehaveDramaticMassiveRenounceCrackpotsDramatic Change
Book:Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
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“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.”

IdeasSelfMatterInformationMassSmartJokesSpreadTunesLegendsHostIrrationalUrbanMarxismHysteriaSusceptibleHummingViralCrackpotsUrban LegendsMass Hysteria
Author:Neal Stephenson
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“Rapture cults had packed their suitcases and were massing together in great vigils, waiting for the end. "All bogus," she'd told Zuzana. "Just a bunch of crackpots waiting for the Apocalypse." "Because, fun, right?" Zuzana rubbed her hands together in mock glee. "Oh, boy. The Apocalypse!" "Right? I know. How much does your life have to suck to want the Apocalypse?”

KnowsWantDoeEndsHandsTogetherFunWaitingBoysKnow HowBunchCultApocalypseMockRaptureGleeSuitcasesCrackpotsHands Together
Author:Laini Taylor
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“Most of the crackpot papers which are submitted to The Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half-understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.”

FirstsLooksDoeFormScienceHalfImpossibleMysteryCrazyPaperUnderstoodDiscoveryInnovationProgrammingReviewsRejectedGlancesPapersConfusingSpeculationIncompletePublicationNo HopeCrackpots
Author:Freeman Dyson
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“We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'.”

PrinciplesWallDemandRacismSlaveryAtheistResolveRepublicPatheticChorusDescendantsDischargeCrackpots
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“I'd seen Sage bleed. I'd made Sage bleed. Not that it hurt him any; he healed so quickly...In smaller doses it has incredible healing powers. Ben's voice rang out in my head. I remembered he said that earlier, about...the Elixir of Life.The crackpot, completely bogus, absolutely insane Elixir of Life.Did it actually exist? Had Sage had some? Enough to keep him alive, young, and speed-healing for the last five hundred years?And if so, had he used that time to find one woman, again and again in different incarnations, to love her...or destroy her?”

IfsLoveYearsMadeSaidDifferentEnoughAgeLastsYoungUsedVoiceHurtHealingFiveAliveHundredIncrediblesSpeedInsaneRememberedAgain And AgainIt HurtsSageHealedIncarnationDoseOne WomanElixirCrackpotsElixir Of Life
Book:Elixir
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