
"Meryl Streep's British ancestor 'helped start war with Native Americans," 2012
"Meryl Streep's British ancestor 'helped start war with Native Americans," 2012
"Me and Miss Mandible".
Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964)
“Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life.”
Quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 53.
I don't need that question answered.
Paris Review Interview (1986)
Source: Tower of Dreams (1999), Chapter 9 (p. 123)
Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)
“In the country of the mad, the sane man is crazy.”
The Overman Culture (1971)
Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom, 1988, p.43
Uncommon Wisdom (1988)
Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Lady Friday (2007), p. 91.
Mary Andrea Glen. (1971). The Long Forgotten Composers, p.107. Edwardian Publishing Processors. ISBN 04632615676840309.
"Interview: Martin Gardner" by Scot Morris in Omni, Vol. 4, No. 4 (January 1982)
Context: Ever since I was a boy, I've been fascinated by crazy science and such things as perpetual motion machines and logical paradoxes. I've always enjoyed keeping up with those ideas. I suppose I didn't get into it seriously until I wrote my first book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I was influenced by the Dianetics movement, now called Scientology, which was then promoted by John Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction. I was astonished at how rapidly the thing had become a cult.
Q&A with community activists, February 10, 1989.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s
Context: If any of you have ever looked at your FBI file, you discover that intelligence agencies in general are extremely incompetent. That's one of the reasons why there are so many intelligence failures. They just never get anything straight, for all kinds of reasons. Part of it is because of the information they get. The information they get comes from ideological fanatics, typically, who always misunderstand things in their own crazy way. If you look at an FBI file, say, about yourself, where you know what the facts are, you'll see that the information has some kind of relation to the facts, you can figure out what they're talking about, but by the time it works its way through the ideological fanaticism of the intelligence agencies, there's always weird distortion.
“Miracles will happen as we trip. But we're never gonna survive, unless…
We get a little crazy”
"Crazy"
Seal (1991)
Context: A man decides after seventy years,
That what he goes there for, is to unlock the door.
While those around him criticize and sleep...
And through a fractal on a breaking wall,
I see you my friend, and touch your face again.
Miracles will happen as we trip. But we're never gonna survive, unless...
We get a little crazy
Still Crazy After All These Years
Song lyrics, Still Crazy After All These Years (1975)
“That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May.”
"The Crazy Woman"
Context: And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
"That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May."
Associated Press interview, September 10, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anxkrm9uEJk / Associated Press interview, September 10, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6urw_PWHYk
Context: I think there is really good chance that Sarah Palin could be president and I think that is a scary thing, because I don't know anything about her. I don't think in eight weeks I'm going to know anything about her. I know she was a mayor of a really, really small town, and she is governor of Alaska for less than two years. I just don't understand. I think the pick was made for political purposes, but in terms of governance it is a disaster. You do the actuary tables, you know there is one out of three chance or more that McCain doesn't survive his first term, and it will be President Palin. It really … I was talking about it earlier, it is like a really bad Disney movie, you know. The hockey mom, I'm just a hockey mom from Alaska, and she is the president. She is like facing down Vladimir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. You know it is absurd. It is totally absurd, and I don't understand why more people aren't talking about how absurd it is. It is a really terrifying possibility. The fact that we have gotten this far, and with that close this being a reality is crazy. I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. That's an important. … I want to know that. I really do. Because she's going to have the nuclear codes, you know. I want to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago or whether she banned books or tried to ban books. I mean, we can't have that.
In a conversation https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/01-16-2014-conversation-on-existential-risk.pdf with Luke Muehlhauser and Eliezer Yudkowsky, January 2014; part of this is quoted by Carl Shulman in "Population ethics and inaccessible populations" https://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2014/08/population-ethics-and-inaccessible.html
Context: So one crazy analogy to how my morality might turn out to work, and the big point here is I don't know how my morality works, is we have a painting and the painting is very beautiful. There is some crap on the painting. Would I like the crap cleaned up? Yes, very much. That's like the suffering that's in the world today. Then there is making more of the painting, that's just a strange function. My utility with the size of the painting, it's just like a strange and complicated function. It may go up in any kind of reasonable term that I can actually foresee, but flatten out, at some point. So to see the world as like a painting and my utility of it is that, I think that is somewhat of an analogy to how my morality may work, that it's not like there is this linear multiplier and the multiplier is one thing or another thing. It's: starting to talk about billions of future generations is just like going so far outside of where my morality has ever been stress-tested. I don't how it would respond. I actually suspect that it would flatten out the same way as with the painting.
“I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.”
"Crazy for This Democracy" in Negro Digest (December 1945).
Context: I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial.
The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.
Metro Weekly interview (2006)
Context: 9 to 5 made people aware of equal pay for equal work. It hasn't really happened, but it has come closer. We're aware of sexual harassment, and of course, there are very few companies that have daycare centers, which seems to me would be the most humane, positive thing to do for a worker. The worker would be more loyal, they'd be more productive. It's so crazy not to do the human thing. It seems to me to be much more profitable to do the human thing. It just makes a better society.
“Pound's crazy. All poets are…. They have to be.”
As quoted in The New York Post (24 January 1957)
Context: Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. For history's sake we shouldn't keep him there.
On Jean-Luc Godard in an interview with John Simon (1971).
Context: In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can't see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me.
“Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I'm so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower.”
Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 1
Context: Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I'm so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower.
Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I'm so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice!
And you tell Mr. Harding right back — he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low — that I'm so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.
"Putting Words in the President's Mouth" (12 October 2004)
The Callahan Chronicals <!-- [Sic] -->(1996) [originally published as Callahan and Company (1988)] "Backword", p. xii
Context: In a culture where pessimism has metastasized like slow carcinoma, that crazy Irishman was backward enough to try to raise hopes, like hothouse flowers. In an era during which even judicious use of alcohol has been increasingly bad-rapped, the man who came to be known as The Mick of Time was backward enough to think that the world can look just that essential tad better when seen through a flask, brightly. (As long as you let someone else drive you home afterward.) Above all, he — and his goofball customers — believed that shared pain is lessened, and shared Joy increased.
Now he is gone. Gone back whence he came, and we are all the poorer for it. But I refuse to say that we will not see his like again. Or his love again.
“Stand up for the 70% of Americans who aren't crazy.”
New Rule: Float Like Obama, Sting Like Ali (2009)
Context: Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the 70% of Americans who aren't crazy.
"The Tucson Zoo", p. 10
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)
Context: Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls. When they are massed together, all touching, exchanging bits of information held in their jaws like memoranda, they become a single animal. Look out for that. It is a debasement, a loss of individuality, a violation of human nature, an unnatural act.
Sometimes people argue this point of view seriously and with deep thought. Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it. You have to print out leaflets or publish books and get them bought and sent around, you have to turn up on television and catch the attention of millions of other human beings all at once, and then you have to say to all of them, all at once, all collected and paying attention: be solitary; do not depend on each other. You can’t do this and keep a straight face.
"Faster Than The Speed Of Night" from the Bonnie Tyler album Faster Than The Speed of Night (1983)
Context: Let me show you how to drive me crazy,
Let me show you how to make me feel so good,
Let me show you how to take me to the edge of the stars and back again.
You've gotta show me how to drive you crazy,
You've gotta show me all the things you wanna happen to you,
We've gotta tell each other everything, we always wanted someone to do.
1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)
Context: By the time we got to the street, I could see the first rays of the sun, a cool pink glow in the eastern sky. The fact that I’d spent all night in a cell and a courtroom made that morning one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. There was a peace and brightness about it, a chilly Caribbean dawn after a night in a filthy jail. I looked out at the ships and the sea beyond them, and I felt crazy to be free with a whole day ahead of me.
Then I realized I would sleep most of the day, and my excitement disappeared.
Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)
Context: I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say "Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!" I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.
Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)
Context: I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word "crazy" to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: "did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy."
Part One, One
The Dud Avocado (1958)
Context: I stumbled across the Champs Élysées. I know it seems crazy to say, but before I actually stepped onto it (at what turned out to be the Étoile ) I had not even been aware of its existence. No, I swear it. I’d heard the words "Champs Élysées," of course, but I thought it was a park or something. I mean that’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it? All at once I found myself standing there gazing down that enchanted boulevard in the blue, blue evening. Everything seemed to fall into place. Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it.
I began floating down those Elysian Fields three inches off the ground, as easily as a Cocteau character floats through Hell. Luxury and order seemed to be shining from every street lamp along the Avenue; shining from every window of its toyshops and dress-shops and carshops; shining from its cafés and cinemas and theaters; from its bonbonneries and parfumeries and nighteries.… Talk about seeing Eternity in a Grain of Sand and Heaven in a Wild Flower; I really think I was having some sort of mystic revelation then. The whole thing seemed like a memory from the womb. It seemed to have been waiting there for me.
For some people history is a Beach or a Tower or a Graveyard. For me it was this giant primordial Toyshop with all its windows gloriously ablaze. It contained everything I’ve ever wanted that money can buy. It was an enormous Christmas present wrapped in silver and blue tissue paper tied with satin ribbons and bells. Inside would be something to adorn, to amuse, and to dazzle me forever. It was my present for being alive.
The Future of Ideas (2001)
Context: A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The "taken for granted" is the test of sanity; "what everyone knows" is the line between us and them.
This means that sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes these unquestioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning becomes too great. In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt.
“I'm so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.”
Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 1
Context: Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I'm so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower.
Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I'm so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice!
And you tell Mr. Harding right back — he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low — that I'm so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.
Excerpt from Clapper's memoir Facts And Fears, quoted in [In 'Facts And Fears,' Ex-Spy Boss Clapper Comes In From The Cold, Badly Chilled, https://www.npr.org/2018/05/22/613107871/in-facts-and-fears-ex-spy-boss-clapper-comes-in-from-the-cold-badly-chilled, 27 July 2018, National Public Radio, May 22, 2018]
Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Context: You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind.
Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less advanced lifeforms, and they'll call you crazy.
Interview with Stephen J. Dubner, for 'Freakonomics Radio' podcast (24 March 2010)
Context: Within my first meeting when I proposed to introduce the flat tax in Estonia they looked on me as I am a little bit crazy. And asked “do you know something on the economy?” and I answer “economically, no not so much.” But I think this is a great idea because it looks to work. And I didn’t know then that I would be the first one to see this, but I introduced it. I was 32, I was young and crazy, so I didn’t know what is possible and what's not, so I did impossible things.
“Oh darlin…
In a sky full of people, only some want to fly,
Isn't that crazy?”
"Crazy"
Seal (1991)
Context: Oh darlin...
In a sky full of people, only some want to fly,
Isn't that crazy?
In a world full of people, only some want to fly,
Isn't that crazy?
A Conversation with Martin de Maat (1998)
Context: What happens in the ensemble work is that in a cooperative work, the power of communication in being with each other in acceptance and "yes, and"-ing each other, is that you as an individual start to believe in yourself because you begin to see yourself in the others' eyes. Your ensemble, your group, your team, your committee, is the one that's believing in you and you pull it together to do it for them. You know, it's simply recognizing you're not alone. I'm way out in theory here; it's the study of what the power is, the power in improvisation and why it changes lives.... I'm crazy about it, and that's why I've dedicated my life to the study of it. The power is love, if you want to know the truth. It's love and unconditional acceptance. You put yourself in a place of support, unconditional acceptance and love for who you are, the way you are and your uniqueness, and what you do is grow. You surround yourself with people who are truly interested in you and listen to you, and you will grow. And it doesn't take much to start advancing you, it doesn't take much of that support, it doesn't take much of that love and that care and you can do it. You can play act with people. You can be in a state of play together.
"Breathe"
2000s, Hotel Paper (2003)
Context: I've been driving for an hour; just talking to the rain. You say I've been driving you crazy, and it's keeping you away. So, just give me one good reason. Tell me why, I should stay. Because I don't want to waste another moment, saying things we never meant to say. And I? Take it, just a little bit. I? Hold my breath and count to ten, I? I've been waiting for a chance, to let you in. If I just, breathe? Let it fill the space between? I'll know, everything is alright. Breathe, every little piece of me. You'll see, everything is alright. If I just, breathe.
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that tis main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quite for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer [to] heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth.
The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)
Context: After hearing incessantly that the people follow him without sense or discretion, he [the political leader] is liable to fall a victim of the delusion which he has created, and to imagine that he possesses some personal attraction, by virtue of which he is followed. The delusion soon develops itself. He will diverge from the authorized track... From habit, the people will move a little in his erratic course. Their compliance augments his delusion, and he will become increasingly regardless of the popular will, and more obstinately intent on his own. He soon becomes monomaniac, and is abandoned except by a few stragglers as crazy as himself; while he interprets the abandonment into ingratitude or heterodoxy, and grows scurrilous, turbulent, and impotent.
We Know How Trump’s War Game Ends, Rolling Stone:Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-syria-withdrawal-772177/ (22 December 2018)
On facing abuse head on in “Meena Kandasamy interview: ‘I don’t know if I’m idiotic – or courageous’” https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/meena-kandasamy-interview-i-don-t-know-if-i-m-idiotic-or-courageous-9238644.html in the Independent (2014 Apr 6)
Bigger and Blacker (Album Version, 1999)
On connecting with your audience in “Life’s Work: An Interview with Trevor Noah” https://hbr.org/2018/09/lifes-work-an-interview-with-trevor-noah in Harvard Business Review (September-October, 2018)
Personal life
Preface, “Infinite Possibility” (p. xiii)
The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997)
On African American women being the “first” in their given fields in “Q&A with Veronica Chambers, author of ‘The Meaning of Michelle’” https://www.stanforddaily.com/2017/02/06/qa-with-veronica-chambers-author-of-the-meaning-of-michelle/ in The Stanford Daily (2017 Feb 6)
On composing poems while practicing as an attorney in “The Writer’s Block Transcripts: A Q&A with Martin Espada” https://www.sampsoniaway.org/interviews/2015/12/11/the-writers-block-transcripts-a-qa-with-martin-espada/ in Sampsonia Way (2015 Dec 11)
I can't be kind about this, because these people are watching The Flinstones as if it were a documentary.
Red, White, and Screwed (2006)
Jeff Ament talking about Cornell on NBA.com podcast NBA Soundsystem ** Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament on Chris Cornell's death and depression, 30 May 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9buvTFxf2EA,
“Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy.”
Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white.
Linus compares Linux and BSDs, NewsForge, 2005-06-13, Barr, Joe, 2006-08-28 http://www.linux.com/articles/45571,
2000s, 2005
February “DISGRACE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)
[NewsBank, Bill Nye challenges grads to 'change the world', The Eagle Tribune, Lawrence, Massachusetts, May 18, 2014]
“You are nothing but a crazy ass jerk!”
You Fucked That Man's Car Up
Lyrics, Solo
Adolf Hitler, to Morell, in the final days of the war.
“Who gives a fuck what they was watching? Whatever happened to crazy?”
Bigger and Blacker (HBO, 1999)
Flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative.
I'm Swiss (2005)
From the Preface to the 1855 edition of <i>Leaves of Grass</i>
Chap. 5 : Become an Elusive Object of Desire
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)
Twitter 7:30 AM https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1069584730880974849?fbclid · (3 Dec 2018)
2010s, 2018, December
2020s, 2020, February, Donald Trump Charleston, South Carolina Rally (February 28, 2020)
2020s, 2020, February, Donald Trump Charleston, South Carolina Rally (February 28, 2020)
On remaining centered and positive in “Goldie Hawn: ‘I was born with a high set point for happiness’” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/13/goldie-hawn-i-was-born-with-a-high-set-point-for-happiness in The Guardian (2020 Apr 13)
73rd Communique of the CPSUZoeD https://www.derstandard.at/jetzt/livebericht/2000116238563/
Quotes as Nikita P. Chrusov
He showed up at the ballfield that day, and as he started shooting at us he yelled "This is for healthcare!", and then when they were finally able to kill him in his pocket was a list of five or six conservative republicans that he came there intending to kill. So instead of saying "get up in their face", we should say let's have constructive dialog. Let's forcefully present our position in a verbal way and in an intellectual way.
2018-10-10
Rand Paul: There Will Be an 'Assassination' If Left Doesn't Ratchet Down the Rhetoric
Discussion on Fox and Friends
http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/10/10/rand-paul-there-will-be-assassination-if-left-doesnt-ratchet-down-rhetoric https://video.foxnews.com/v/5847225479001/?#sp=show-clips
Erika Jayne interview to AXS https://www.axs.com/pain-killr-dance-queen-erika-jayne-talks-infectious-new-song-album-and-19682 (2014)
Almost Friends: Odeya Rush On The Attraction To Romantic Love Stories And Indies https://lrmonline.com/news/odeya-rush-interview/ (November 29, 2017)
“To be old and wise, you must first be young and crazy.”
Original: (it) Per essere vecchi e saggi, bisogna prima essere giovani e folli.
Source: prevale.net
“You crazy? You’ve got me confused with a guy who cares about other people.”
Source: The Heritage Universe, Resurgence (2002), Chapter 30, “Stripping the Ship” (p. 368)
“When the mind loses control, you are qualified to be called crazy.”
Source: As quoted in "The Frail Goddess," The Real and the Unreal (1961) by Bill Davidson, p. 78
Source: All About Me (New York: Ballantine Books, 2021), p. 451