Crank Quotes - Page 3

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

Body, Way, Century

"And then there were 16". "The Journal Editorial Report" with Paul Gigot, www.foxnews.com. July 25, 2015.

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When I was 15, my parents left town for a month. They hid the keys to the car, but I found them. That month, I drove my stepdad's Thunderbird Super Coupe into Manhattan every day, and I would crank Cypress Hill as I flew around the city, racing the taxis.

Danny Masterson

Keys, Cities, Car

"Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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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

Space, Community, Risk

Michio Kaku (1995). “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension”, p.23, OUP Oxford

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Any part of the piggy Is quite all right with me Ham from Westphalia, ham from Parma Ham as lean as the Dalai Lama Ham from Virginia, ham from York, Trotters Sausages, hot roast pork. Crackling crisp for my teeth to grind on Bacon with or without the rind on Though humanitarian I'm not a vegetarian. I'm neither crank nor prude nor prig And though it may sound infra dig Any part of the darling pig Is perfectly fine with me.

Noel Coward

Food, Pigs, Virginia

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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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Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles, Nods and Becks and wreathèd Smiles.

John Milton

Nymphs, Wreaths, Dimples

'L'Allegro' (1645) l. 25

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(UGO, about Crank) I see the addiction to video games because you want to win them and it's just hard enough so you'd want to keep playing it over and over to try to figure it out. I definitely feel the movie is like a game at times but I'm not a huge videogame lover.

Amy Smart

Winning, Games, Addiction

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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.

Louis Kronenberger

Men, Law, Might

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

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There is a strange idea aboard, held by all monetary cranks, that credit is something a banker gives to a man. Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has. He has it, perhaps, because he already has marketable assets of a greater cash value than the loan for which he is asking. Or he has it because his character and past record have earned it. He brings it into the bank with him. That is why the banker makes him the loan.

Henry Hazlitt

Character, Men, Past

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I get so many ideas for songs, but I'm so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.

Amanda Palmer

Song, Ideas, Down And

"Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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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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Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. Remarking on the complexity of Ptolemaic model of the universe after it was explained to him. Footnote: Carlyle says, in his History of Frederick the Great, book ii. chap. vii. that this saying of Alphonso about Ptolemy's astronomy, 'that it seemed a crank machine; that it was pity the Creator had not taken advice,' is still remembered by mankind, - this and no other of his many sayings.

Alfonso X of Castile

Book, Taken, Science

Said after studying the Ptolemaic system (attributed)

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Crank up the Beach Boys, Baby.

Randy Newman

Baby, Beach, Boys

Song: I Love L.A

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In the computer industry, you've got an interdisciplinary team of people who can come together, attack the problem, and work in a collaborative style. You knock down one problem after another, cobble things together, and then hopefully turn the crank at some point.

Paul Allen

Team, People, Style

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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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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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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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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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