Crazy Quotes (27 quotes)
L'homme est bien insensé. Il ne saurait forger un ciron, et forge des Dieux à douzaines.
Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.
Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.
The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (1958), 834.
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
In A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949, 1956), 625.
Consider the very roots of our ability to discern truth. Above all (or perhaps I should say “underneath all”), common sense is what we depend on—that crazily elusive, ubiquitous faculty we all have to some degree or other. … If we apply common sense to itself over and over again, we wind up building a skyscraper. The ground floor of the structure is the ordinary common sense we all have, and the rules for building news floors are implicit in the ground floor itself. However, working it all out is a gigantic task, and the result is a structure that transcends mere common sense.
In Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (1985), 93–94.
During seasons of great pestilence men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was come. Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity. Prophecies of all sorts are rife on such occasions, and are readily believed, whether for good or evil.
From Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), Vol. 1, 170.
Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated by crazy science and such things as perpetual motion machines and logical paradoxes. I’ve always enjoyed keeping up with those ideas. I suppose I didn’t get into it seriously until I wrote my first book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I was influenced by the Dianetics movement, now called Scientology, which was then promoted by John Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction. I was astonished at how rapidly the thing had become a cult.
In Scot Morris, 'Interview: Martin Gardner', Omni, 4, No. 4 (Jan 1982), 68.
Everybody is pathological to a certain degree... the more so the elevated his standing... only myth and cliche have that a person must be either sane or crazy.
In Ausgewahlte Werke, Vol. I (1909), xi.
Fires from beneath, and meteors from above,
Portentous, unexampled, unexplain'd,
Have kindled beacons in the skies; and th' old
And crazy earth has had her shaking fits
More frequent, and foregone her usual rest.
Is it a time to wrangle, when the props
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,
And nature, with a dim and sickly eye,
To wait the close of all?
Alluding the meteors of 17 Aug 1883.
Portentous, unexampled, unexplain'd,
Have kindled beacons in the skies; and th' old
And crazy earth has had her shaking fits
More frequent, and foregone her usual rest.
Is it a time to wrangle, when the props
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,
And nature, with a dim and sickly eye,
To wait the close of all?
Alluding the meteors of 17 Aug 1883.
'The Time-Piece,' Task, Book ii, lines 58-66. In William Cowper, Henry Francis Cary, The Poetical Works of William Cowper (1863), 52-53.
Grossmann, you must help me, or else I’ll go crazy!
From the original German: “Grossmann, Du mußt mir helfen, sonst werd’ ich verrückt!” Einstein implored his mathematician friend, Marcel Grossmann, for collaboration. Einstein lacked knowledge on using higher-dimensional differential geometry, but realized he needed it to describe gravitation when developing his general theory of relativity. As quoted in K. Kollros, Helv. Phys. Acta. Suppl. (1956), 4, 271. As cited in Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord (1982, 2005), 212.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
In Apple Computer newspaper advertisement (1997) as quoted and cited in Tad Lathrop and Jim Pettigrew, This Business of Music Marketing and Promotion (1999), 55.
Humanity is about to learn that a lunatic (touched by the moon) is not a crazy man but one so sane, well-informed, well-coordinated, self-disciplined, cooperative and fearless as to be the first earthian human to have been ferried to a physical landing upon the moon, and thereafter to have been returned safely to reboard his mother space vehicle earth.
In 'Reactions to Man’s Landing on the Moon Show Broad Variations in Opinions', The New York Times (21 Jul 1969), 6.
I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man’s motivation–and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study ... The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.
…...
I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation… It doesn’t look right.
Interview published in Paul C.W. Davies and Julian R. Brown (eds.),Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988, 1992), 194.
If the world goes crazy for a lovely fossil, that's fine with me. But if that fossil releases some kind of mysterious brain ray that makes people say crazy things and write lazy articles, a serious swarm of flies ends up in my ointment.
Criticism of excessive media hype about a fossil discovery, from blog 'The Loom' (19 May 2009) on Discover magazine website.
Imagine if trees gave free WIFI. We’d all be planting them like crazy. It’s a pity they only give us the oxygen we breathe.
Internet meme.
In a notable family called Stein
There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein.
Gert's writing was hazy,
Ep's statues were crazy,
And nobody understood Ein.
There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein.
Gert's writing was hazy,
Ep's statues were crazy,
And nobody understood Ein.
Out on a Limerick (1961), 76.
Like thousands of other boys, I had a little chemical laboratory in our cellar and think that some of our friends thought me a bit crazy.
Quoted in 'Langmuir Winner Stumped Einstein”, New York Times (23 Aug 1931), N2.
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.
In 'Innovation in Physics', Scientific American (Sep 1958), 199. Collected in From Eros to Gaia (1993).
People ask me often [whether] the Nobel Prize [was] the thing you were aiming for all your life, and I say that would be crazy. Nobody would aim for a Nobel Prize because, if you didn’t get it, your whole life would be wasted. What we were aiming at was getting people well, and the satisfaction of that is much greater than any prize you can get.
Quoted in interview by Mary Ellen Avery (1997).
Since my mother is the type that’s called schizophrenogenic in the literature—she's the one who makes crazy people, crazy children—I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.
Quoted in Colin Wilson,New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972, 2001), 155-56.
Some people think Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy.
Quoted in Dennis Overbye, 'John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term Black Hole, Is Dead at 96', New York Times (14 Apr 2008).
The crack-brained bobolink courts his crazy mate,
Posed on a bulrush tipsy with his weight.
Posed on a bulrush tipsy with his weight.
In poem, 'Spring', collected in Grandmother's Story: And Other Poems (1883, 1903), 75.
The supposed astronomical proofs of the theory [of relativity], as cited and claimed by Einstein, do not exist. He is a confusionist. The Einstein theory is a fallacy. The theory that ether does not exist, and that gravity is not a force but a property of space can only be described as a
crazy vagary, a disgrace to our age.
Quoted in Elizabeth Dilling, A "Who's Who" and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots (1934), 49.
They thought I was crazy, absolutely mad.
The response (1944) of the National Academy of Sciences, to her (later Nobel prize-winning) theory that proposed that genes could transition—'jumping'—to new locations on a chromosome.
The response (1944) of the National Academy of Sciences, to her (later Nobel prize-winning) theory that proposed that genes could transition—'jumping'—to new locations on a chromosome.
Quoted in Claudia Wallis, 'Honoring a Modern Mendel', Time (24 Oct 1983), 43.
This beast is best felt. Shake, rattle, and roll. We are thrown left and right against our straps in spasmodic little jerks. It is steering like crazy, like a nervous lady driving a wide car down a narrow alley, and I just hope it knows where it’s going, because for the first ten seconds we are perilously close to that umbilical tower.
…...
We all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
In The Ambidextrous Universe by Martin Gardner (1964).
Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you had better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.
Your theory is crazy...but it’s not crazy enough to be true.
…...
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
