Just as every conviction begins as a whim so does every emancipator serve his apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great lead...er who is just entering the room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the... writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an airhole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 de...termined 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these t...hings, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is snowing and death bugs me as stubborn as insomnia.... The fierce bubbles of chalk, the little white lesions settle on the street outside.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smoo...th,--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter- friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »