Crank Quotes - Page 3

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

  Stephen Hawking

  Weirdo, Ufo, Reports

  "Questioning the universe". TED Talk, www.ted.com. February 2008.

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• What gets up my nose is being infantilized by governments, by the BBC, by the Guardian that there is no argument, that all scientists who aren’t cranks and charlatans are agreed on all this, that the consequences are uniformly negative, the issues beyond doubt and the steps to be taken beyond dispute.

  Michael Buerk

  Taken, Government, Issues

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• All of us are subjected to somebody else's power at some point. So once in a while you kiss ass. So what? Either you make your peace with that early, or you end up living your life as a crank and a misfit.

  Sue Grafton

  Kissing, Live Your Life, Ass

  Sue Grafton (2010). “"H" is for Homicide”, p.26, Macmillan

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• As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  People, Political, Tools

  "An Urchin in the Storm". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "The Quack Detector", p. 245, 1987.

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• To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Mean, Men

  Ernest Hemingway (2015). “Ernest Hemingway: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations”, p.39, Melville House

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• I'm not the fastest writer. I can't just crank out ideas that are good enough.

  Amy Lee

  Ideas, Good Enough, I Can

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• I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken.

  Saul Bellow

  Strong, Sleep, Eight

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• It is easy to be seen as either a genius or a crank. If you have a Ph.D., at least you somewhat lower the chances that you will be seen as a crank.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Genius, Chance, Easy

  "The Internet’s Verbal Contrarian" by Noam Cohen, www.nytimes.com. August 14, 2013.

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• To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.

  Annie Dillard

  Coffee, Useless, Tiny

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• Yoshihiro Togashi here. I'm back doing a weekly serial, and here I am publishing my first volume already. Thanks to all my readers for their support. I am entirely indebted to you. I took this picture (it is a photo of Togashi wearing a rabbit mask) at a certain party by the way, not a shady membership club. I'll work hard to crank out dozens of volumes. I promise not to complain. I won't run away. I won't lose it. I think. Maybe.

  Yoshihiro Togashi

  Running, Party, Hard Work

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• Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, Crank, with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Believe, Hitting, Pages

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• The so-called ‘crank’ may be quite original in his ideas. … Invention, however, in the engineering sense involves originality; but not that alone, if the results are to be of value. There is imagination more or less fertile, but with it a knowledge of what has been done before, carried perhaps by the memory, together with a sense of the present or prospective needs in art or industry. Necessity is not always the mother of invention. It may be prevision.

  Elihu Thomson

  Mother, Art, Memories

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• On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Men, Ice Cream, Law

  "Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life". Book by Louis Kronenberger, 1954.

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• I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Thinking, Hands, Rest Of Your Life

  "A life in writing: Cynthia Ozick". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2011.

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• If I could have somehow been the kind of artist who could crank out two or three issues a year, that's different. That's sort of what it's all about, to get this thing out so that there's some kind of continuity. But to do a comic book every year or two was just so anti-climactic.

  Daniel Clowes

  Book, Artist, Years

  Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. October 19, 2011.

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• Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.

  Rheta Childe Dorr

  Years, Class, Knowing

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• We cannot hope to change human nature. There will always be cranks and conspiracy theorists among us. But we can try to improve things - we don't have to accept the debasement of civil discourse or civic decline. We can take steps to ensure that the lunatic fringe remains on the fringe and stops bleeding into the base and then poisoning the mainstream

  John Avlon

  Trying, Bleeding, Steps

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• I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.

  Martin Amis

  Technique, Fiction, Volume

  Source: www.vulture.com

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• I have people who look after me and help me when I'm out of town. But when I'm at home in LA it's my time and I love to just get in my car, crank up the music and relax.

  Carmen Electra

  Home, People, Car

  "Scary Movie 4 - Carmen Electra interview". www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.

  Chad Harbach

  Book, Space, Gears

  Source: www.gq.com

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• There was a stage inside it and a crank on the outside that would rotate something, like a tiny tree carved of cork, onto the stage, and then the thousands of little mirrors would multiply that one tree so that the viewer would see an infinite forest instead.

  Danielle Dutton

  Mirrors, Tree, Littles

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I feel like there's a lot of experience I have from doing TV animation that would be especially useful doing an animated film in terms of some efficiencies of the process that are necessary for TV, just because you have to crank out material every week, that could be applied to film.

  David X. Cohen

  Would Be, Tvs, Film

  Source: www.ign.com

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• Experience has taught me a technique for dealing with such people [...] I counter the devotees of the Great Pyramid by adoration of the Sphinx; and the devotee of nuts by pointing out that hazelnuts and walnuts are as deleterious as other foods and only Brazil nuts should be tolerated. But when I was younger I had not yet acquired this technique, with the result that my contacts with cranks were sometimes alarming.

  Bertrand Russell

  Nuts, Pyramids, People

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• If you want something bad enough, you've got to make a bold move. Just make sure you clear the bold move with the people whose lives it's going to affect. Like George Washington, had to get all those guys who the British killed to agree to die. Neil Armstrong, had to crank a couple of elbows into Buzz Aldrin's face mask to make sure he got on the moon first. And Christopher Titus, well, he worked his dad for five grand. Ha ha. Who can't support who ? I know, it's complicated.

  Christopher Titus

  Couple, Dad, Moving

  "The Gift of the Car Guy". "Titus" (TV Series), m.imdb.com. 2001.

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• You ain't ever gonna get an Academy Award for doing 'Crank,' and you certainly won't for doing all the other movies I've done.

  Jason Statham

  Awards, Done, Academy

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