Quotes About Cranks

#1. The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#2. He cranks up his arm, rears back, and throws, and the ball, taking an even more perfect path than it took off the bat, travels in a white arc, seeming to leave behind a line like a streak of forgotten rainbow as it drops over the fence, silent as a star falling into a distant ocean.

W.P. Kinsella

#3. The real threat from cranks is not that their customers might die
there is the odd case, although it seems crass to harp on about them - but that they systematically the public's understanding about the very nature of evidence.

Ben Goldacre

#4. I never felt at home. I stuck outIn New York City, especially in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks and the misfits and the one-lungers and the has-beens and the might've beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home.

Joseph Mitchell

#5. Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.

Rose Macaulay

#6. A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. It is characteristic of a crisis in theory that cranks get a hearing from the public which orthodoxy is failing to satisfy.

Joan Robinson

#7. I bring a poofy gray down jacket with me wherever I go. It's meant for winter, but I use it most in the summer, when everyone cranks up the air-conditioning.

Leslie Mann

#8. Scientists willing to risk their reputations on higher dimensions soon found themselves ridiculed by the scientific community. Higher-dimensional space became the last refuge for mystics, cranks, and charlatans.

Michio Kaku

#9. There have always been hucksters, cranks and populists who see a brief rise in American politics, going back to William Jennings Bryan at the turn of the century. The body politic has a way of expelling these invaders.

Joseph Rago

#10. Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans - and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas - than quantum mechanics.

Sean Carroll

#11. Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.

Henri Bergson

#12. What's there to be scared about? A post-apocalyptic city with no government or security, surrounded by a desert and swarming with Cranks. I mean, come on. Don't be a sissy.

James Dashner

#13. Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.

Willard Van Orman Quine

#14. You know, the Tea Party is a - first of all, it is a significant movement, and I think the media and some pundits have tried to write it off as a bunch of cranks or something. But, in fact, it's really a very legitimate and fairly significant swath of voters out there.

Mark McKinnon

#15. No, Newt, I don't understand," Minho said, the frustration in his voice escalating. "We risked our necks to come to this place and you're our friend and we're taking you home. You wanna whine and cry while you go crazy, that's fine. But you're gonna do it with us, not with these shuck Cranks.

James Dashner

#16. He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.

Giulio Tononi

#17. He cranks the condo's AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you're dreading whatever you think of.

David Foster Wallace

#18. More cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths.

Bertrand Russell

#19. The Bolshevists would blow up the fabric with high explosive, with horror. Others would pull down with the crowbars and with cranks
especially with cranks ... Sweating, slums, the sense of semi-slavery in labour, must go. We must cultivate a sense of manhood by treating men as men.

David Lloyd George

#20. I mean, horror films in general put humans in these awful supernatural or horrible situations, but 'Cabin In The Woods' cranks it up a few notches and becomes outrageous and totally bizarre.

Fran Kranz

#21. Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis that is, enforce confession without absolution.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#22. It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.

Saul Bellow

#23. Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks and heretics the world would not progress.

Gelett Burgess

#24. The humblest praise most, while cranks & malcontents praise least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible

C.S. Lewis

#25. He smirks and cranks his glorious smile up another notch so it's in full HD IMAX.

E.L. James

#26. Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest, and youthful Jollity, Quips, and Cranks, and wanton Wiles, Nods, and Becks, and wreathed Smiles, Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek; Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides.

John Milton

#27. I love to play my music. That's what my heart wants me to do is to play music, and I love doing that when I got my band and my crew and all those folks with me, and that whole thing cranks up; it's really something to enjoy.

Ronnie Milsap

#28. Old cranks have practiced all their lives, just as old saints have likewise practiced all their lives. They just practiced different life principles.

John Powell

#29. I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people joyful; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. Next after theology, I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor.

Martin Luther

#30. Attempting mischievous and salutary irritation of his peers ... Keynes may only succeed in becoming an academic idol of our worst cranks and charlatans - not to mention the possibilities of the book as the economic bible of a fascist movement.

Henry Calvert Simons

#31. Thomas remembered the image of the Cranks at the windows back at the dorm. Like living nightmares, missing only a death certificate to make them official zombies.

James Dashner

#32. The reason why Hollywood cranks out so many sequels and adaptations is because the audience is so overwhelmed with choices, the only way to get them in the theater is to give them something familiar.

David Wong

#33. I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?

Stephen Hawking

#34. Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes
not often, but sometimes
the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.

Matthew Scully

#35. I have been known as a crank, faddist, madman. Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to myself cranks, faddists, and madmen.

Mahatma Gandhi

#36. There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.

Bertrand Russell

#37. We simulated the predator with livestock and the perennial grassland returned. Just put the whole back, and there it was. You'll find the scientific method never discovers anything. Observant, creative people make discoveries. But the scientific method protects us from cranks like me.

Allan Savory

#38. Dr. Arnold ... the admired reformer of public schools, came across some cranks who thought it a mistake to flog boys. Anyone reading his outburst of furious indignation against this opinion will be forced to the conclusion that he enjoyed inflicting floggings.

Bertrand Russell

#39. Enlightened self-interest from those involved in hydrocarbons should lead to the support of technologies enabling the clean use of hydrocarbons, such as carbon capture and storage, and not to the defence of deniers and cranks.

Nicholas Stern

#40. False hope," she said. "Guess that's better then no hope at all.

James Dashner

#41. Rose took my nose, I suppose. And it really blows ... Get it? It really blows. My nose. Taken by Rose. I suppose.

James Dashner

#42. Rose took my nose, I suppose," he repeated; the bubble of phlegm in his throat made a disgusting crackle. "And it really blows.

James Dashner

#43. Everybody should espouse three or four harmless crank theories for the pure pleasure of having something harmless to be cranky about. And when a theory of this sort proves correct, it is a true moment for celebration.

Alexei Panshin