Crackpots Quotes

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'. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Moreover, what is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon; they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence. ~ Hannah Arendt

The notion that inventors are anorak-wearing crackpots with glasses held together with Sellotape is beguiling but wrong. ~ Trevor Baylis

If the guy out in the woods with the Michigan Militia is a real estate negotiator, instead of some crackpot, and has a normal life, that's unnerving. You don't want to think it's as normal as the guy next door, hedging his lawn. It's easier to demonize or separate them off from 'us.' ~ Michael Moore

Alas, some of those crackpots will only be eliminated by something lethal, such as a firing squad. The best we can do unless you want to invoke such lethal force is the segregation - the quarantine, perhaps - of those that pollute the hive mind with their irrational gibberings ~ Andrew Williams

To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. ~ Hannah Arendt

Crackpot is an excellent job because the expectations are so low. No one ever tells crackpots that they should be doing more. ~ Scott Adams

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. ~ Hanna Arendt

Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world. ~ Edward Abbey

Nutrition ... has been kicked around like a puppy that cannot take care of itself. Food faddists and crackpots have kicked it pretty cruelly ... ~ Adelle Davis

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost. ~ Thomas J. Watson Jr.

Everybody has the right to express what he thinks. That, of course, lets the crackpots in. But if you cannot tell a crackpot when you see one, then you ought to be taken in. ~ Harry S. Truman

Here at great expense,' [Colonel Groves] moaned to Oppenheimer, 'the government has assembled the world's largest collection of crackpots. ~ Steve Sheinkin

Katherine's theory is that everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives us the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits. "We just accumulate more and more strange people," she says. "All we are are the fugitives and refugees. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Larry King's show got to be an increasingly lonely outpost of humane civility in a mephitic menagerie of hotheads, saber rattlers, cretins and crackpots. ~ Tom Shales

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.
Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.) ~ Isaac Asimov

A crackpot theory. Instead of saying labor's exploited, as Marx did, Kelso says capital's exploited. It's worse than Marx. It's Marx stood on its head. ~ Milton Friedman

Proponents of the "we're all one race," swill took another hit recently when scientists revealed that bananas share about 50% of the DNA of humans (I kid you not). This is 10% more than what we share with earthworms. Add this information to the previous revelation that humans and chimps are 98.4% the same genetically, and you begin to see the problem for the we're all one race crowd - our present ignorant flat worlders. The reason this is a hit for the all one race crackpots is because it is just a further indication that nature works with minor changes to make major differences. In fact, there are no "tiny" changes in nature at the DNA level of existence. Just a minor change here or there makes a totally different animal or plant. ~ H. Millard

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. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I got married the second time in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime. ~ Delmore Schwartz

Everybody was strange. In a fit of frustration, she scratched out strange and wrote the word CRACKPOTS in big letters. ~ Kristin Cashore

Jesus was a crackpot. ~ Rajneesh

Where to start, Fitger thought. The department was a funhouse of dysfunctional characters. Academia was, traditionally, a refuge for the poorly socialized and the obsessive; but English, at Payne, had a higher percentage of crackpots than most. ~ Julie Schumacher

For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end ... such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own. ~ C. Wright Mills

Is it not true that each superpower has enough nuclear weapons to kill all members of mankind several times over? Yes. And the same is true of kitchen knives. ~ Petr Beckmann

A lot of professionals are crackpots. ~ Jenny Holzer