Crank Quotes - page 3

(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything." (Colin Wilson)
On the May 10 2006, edition of Fox New's The Big Story, after the release of a letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to U.S. President George W. Bush, Gibson compared the letter from the Iranian President to talking points and positions by Democrats. Gibson said, "Terry McAuliffe and the other Democrats should pay close attention to their talking points these days. That nut job running Iran, President - let's see if I can pronounce it - Ahmadinejad, sent President Bush a letter, and if it weren't postmarked Tehran, it might have been mistaken for a crank letter from an angry leftist in L.A. or Boulder or Cambridge, Massachusetts. Christians are not acting like Christians, says the Iranian president. Democrat talking point. WMD lies, says the Iranian president. Democrat talking point. Human-rights abuses in Gitmo. Another Democrat talking point. The gap between haves and have-nots. The Iranian president and the Dems in lockstep on that one, too." View quote
John Gibson (media host)
So much fantasy relies on the author's having read Fraser's The Golden Bough or Robert Graves' The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything. View quote
Elizabeth Hand