Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.
A crank is a little thing that makes revolutions.
A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars.
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.
There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.
More cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths.
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.
The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.
Loads of weirdos send me things, like strange bits of leather. And then there was the guy who thought I was having his baby. Apparently, he's been writing to Princess Anne too, so I clearly belong to a good, erm, sub-section of society.
… pinheaded, anarchistic cranks.
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.
Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth breather there is.
