“Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

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Theodore Roosevelt 445

American politician, 26th president of the United States 1858–1919

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“Among the wise and high-minded people who in self-respecting and genuine fashion strive earnestly for peace, there are the foolish fanatics always to be found in such a movement and always discrediting it — the men who form the lunatic fringe in all reform movements.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Source: 1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913), Ch. VII : The War of American and the Unready.

“The progressive movement is the lunatic fringe of the left. It is the home of everything that you despise. It is the home of income tax. It is the home of prohibition. It is the home of the Fed.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2010s, 2010

“The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

“The way to find what the mainstream will do tomorrow is to associate with the lunatic fringe today.”

Jean-Louis Gassée (1944) French businessman

Sandy Reed, "Gassee's dual-processor BeBox challenges passe PCs", InfoWorld,

“…the lunatic fringe group called Neturei Karta, whose total world membership is about 10…”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

September 25, 2008 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31360_Reuters_Hearts_Neturei_Karta&only

“When I used to speak of the lunatic fringe, I didn’t know I was going to be head of it.”

Oscar Levant book The Memoirs of an Amnesiac

The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965)

“Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

"Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind By Communism" http://www.dorislessing.org/unexamined.html, in Our Country, Our Culture - The Politics of Political Correctness (1994), Partisan Review Press, edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Philips

“The gay rights movement is not a party. It is not a lifestyle. It is not a hair style. It is not a fad or a fringe or a sickness. It is not about sin or salvation. The gay rights movement is an integral part of the American promise of freedom.”

Urvashi Vaid (1958) Indian writer

At the March on Washington, 4/25/93

“The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare, nor should this Court, ordained as a judicial body, be thought of as a general haven for reform movements.”

John Marshall Harlan II (1899–1971) American judge and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (1899-1971)

Dissenting in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 624-25 (1964).

“I hope and believe cultural history will make progress if it also fixes its attention firmly on the individual human being. Movements, as distinct from periods, are started by people. Some of them are abortive, others catch on. Each movement in its turn has a core of dedicated souls, a crowd of hangers-on, not to forget a lunatic fringe. There is a whole spectrum of attitudes and degrees of conversion. Even within the individual there may be various levels of conviction, various conscious and unconscious fluctuations in loyalty. What seemed acceptable during the mass rally or revivalist meeting may look pretty crazy on the way home. But movements would not be movements if they did not have their badges, their outward signs, their style of behaviour, style of speech and of dress. Who can probe the motives which prompt individuals to adopt some of these, and who would venture in every case to pronounce on the completeness of the conversion this adoption may express? Knowing these limitations, the cultural historian will be a little wary of the claims of cultural psychology.”

Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) art historian

In Search of Cultural History (1969)

“Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.”

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