"Crack-brained" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but I don't like the idea of it. There is apt to be something underlying this, or even if it is only a single individual and he happens to be a crank he could cause a lot of trouble. Suppose, for instance, one of these crack-brained foreigners in the shop got it into his head that Torrance here was grinding him down in order to increase our profits? Why, he might attack him at any time! I tell you, we have got to be prepared for such a contingency, especially ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and no doubt he wrought with it miracles beyond the vulgar comprehension. His mind had no more real depth than a looking-glass with a crack in it, and its images were disjointed and confused. There are many such men, but few possess unlimited means of carrying their crack-brained ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... so far, you must now know that Juan Lanas, the blind man, with the change of district and dwelling did not change his judgment and if he was crack-brained at San Garcia, he remained crack-brained at Toledo, consuming in this resort his money upon worthless drugs and quacks which did not cure his blindness and impoverished him more and more every day, so that if his daughter had not been so dexterous with her fingers in making and ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... fortune. The obituary of a Louisville lady who died a short time ago contained the startling announcement that she had actually danced with the Duke. Every chappie who was permitted to pay for a mint julep absorbed by this subject of a crack-brained Czar secured a certificate to that effect and had ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... I agreed. "He has fallen her victim, and so his vanity translates her into a compound of perfections. Does such a woman as you have described exist, Comte? Bah! In a lover's mind, perhaps, or in the pages of some crack-brained poet's fancies; but nowhere else in this dull world ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... effect the regeneration of the kingdom; the other the 14th of July, on which, as they boasted, they had forever established freedom by the destruction of the Bastile; and they determined this year to celebrate both these anniversaries in a becoming manner. Accordingly, on the 20th of June, a crack-brained member of the Jacobin Club, a Prussian of noble birth, named Clootz, who, to show his affinity with the philosophers of old, had assumed the name of Anacharsis, hired a band of vagrants and idlers, and, dressing them up in a variety of costumes ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... and of his reiterated protestations, he has put up our very priests at auction and sold them off to the highest bidder, in order that his Huguenots might have on whom to wreak at leisure their diabolic hatred. He thinks himself King of France; it is a malady common to the crack-brained to fancy themselves kings of the first realm they spy and to fashion them seigniories in the air. Beware trusting your fowls ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... his goodly apparel. Gray-headed, hollow-eyed, pale-cheeked and lean-bodied, he was the perfect picture of a man who had fed on windy schemes and empty hopes till he could neither live on such unwholesome trash nor stomach more substantial food. But, withal, this Peter Goldthwaite, crack-brained simpleton as, perhaps, he was, might have cut a very brilliant figure in the world had he employed his imagination in the airy business of poetry instead of making it a demon of mischief in mercantile pursuits. After all, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... knew very well," he cried, "that the wheelwright could not be far off! You left us to run after that crack-brained fellow, eh? You wretched girl! When's the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... affront." The General's eye danced in telling it. The thing of the firing had been done—nobody was hurt—nobody was in fact in hostile array; and far less was the party itself alarmed. It had been some crack-brained Indian, I believe Sassaba, who yet smarted at the remembrance of the death of his brother, who was killed with Tecumseh in the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... socialists, or communists, who, like those of the present day, wished to abolish private property, and establish "an equal division of unequal earnings," while others declared and acted out their belief in the coming end of the world. Eventually Cromwell had to deal with these crack-brained enthusiasts in a decided way, especially as some of them threatened to assassinate him in order to hasten the advent of the personal reign of Christ ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... him with, "The big thing the Legion's got to teach is Americanism and let those crack-brained fools know just what this country stands for." While still another injected, "The average 'long-beard' has been so crazed by persecution in Russia that he would mistake Peacock Alley in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... Horatian humor about them. The most serious and systematic discourse which Horace has given us, in his Satires, on the art of living, comes from the crack-brained Damasippus, who has made a failure of his own life. In another of his poems, after having set forth at great length the weaknesses of his fellow-mortals, Horace himself is convicted of being inconsistent, a slave to his passions, and a victim of hot temper by his own slave Davus. We ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... "He is crack-brained, and calls himself the King," she murmured. "Let him believe it for our sport." Then she called aloud, gulling the suspicious visitor, "Do homage to the King, damsels, and perhaps he may fling his favor to the one of you that dances the ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... me darkly, and then went on in his crack-brained way, "What is life but a challenge to pretense, a constant exercise in duplicity, with so few that come to master it as an art? Every one goes about with something locked deep in his heart. Take yourself, Captain Barnaby. You have your secrets—hidden from me, from all the world—which, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the evening is pleasant, and I think I need some air. That crack-brained, red-haired fellow of yours will watch you while I am gone, and for mercy's sake be careful with those candles. Nay, nay; you must have no fire, you must go cold. After what you said to me, I can think of naught but fire. It is for this night only. By to-morrow evening ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... girl," she said, "you are not going to be so... crack-brained... as to stand here... arguing and contracting... rheumatism, lumbago... and other absurd complaints... when you know PERFECTLY well that we had already arranged to go... to supper!" She turned ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... said I, boldly, "knows there's not a particle of truth in it. The man's malignancy has taken the form of a fixed idea. He's crack-brained. Between us we put the fear of God into him, and I don't think ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... sake of Islam, O caliph," replied Giaffar, "let us forbear to trifle with that crack-brained drunkard any more. Already has Allah delivered us out of his hands. What may we not expect if he ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... be a useless waste of time, sir, if you had," Captain Rudstone interrupted, almost fiercely. "The characters are meaningless. I'll warrant 'tis but a jest on the part of some crack-brained hunter or trapper, or possibly one of the laborers who built the fort. And surely we have more ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... "Crack-brained sheep's head that you are!" snarled the Dwarf; "what are you going to call other people for? You are two too many now for me; can you think of ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... bawled the old maid, half squeaking through her nose, which was well charged with rappee, "did'nt I tell you so? I knew the fellow would not come to terms no more than will your refractory daughter. This love fairly bewitches such foolish, crack-brained youngsters. But say Mr. ——, what's your name, addressing herself to Alonzo, will love heat the oven? will love boil the pot? will love clothe ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... neighbourhood of Limehouse and Poplar; the second happened on the 8th of March, and was chiefly felt in the north of London, and towards Hampstead and Highgate. It soon became the subject of general remark, that there was exactly an interval of a month between the shocks; and a crack-brained fellow, named Bell, a soldier in the Life Guards, was so impressed with the idea that there would be a third in another month, that he lost his senses altogether, and ran about the streets predicting the destruction ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... on the walls, and there are yellow stains where others hung. Where are they? for I think I heard a man say he bought them on account of their handsome frames, from that crack-brained officer at Cucumber Lake; and he shut his eye, and looked knowing and whispered, 'Something wrong there, had to sell out of the army; some queer story about another wife still living; don't know particulars.' Poor Dechamps, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... that the men who have done the most for North America did not intend to do so. They set out on the far quest of a crack-brained idealist's dream. They pulled up at a foreshortened purpose; but the unaccomplished aim did more for humanity ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... Frenchman" was smiling, too. He had elaborated the scheme already discussed with Winter. It was much to his liking, though unorthodox, rather crack-brained, more than risky, and altogether opposed to the instructions of the Police Manual. Each of these drawbacks was a commendation to Furneaux. In fact, the Steynholme mystery had taken quite a favorable turn during that ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... shoe-maker in his shop tugs gently at the threads of illusion: how promptly up and down the lanes and streets the thing begins to rage; men, women, boys and children, fall upon one another like mad and blind; and the crack-brained spirit is not to be laid until a shower fall of blows—a shower of blows, kicks and cudgel-thwacks, to smother the angry conflagration. God knows how it all came about?" He smiles again, reflectively, over the recollection of the lovely quiet evening it was, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... realized the full potentialities of humour contained in the contrast between the two brothers Shandy. The very work of sharpening and deepening the outlines of this humorous antithesis, while it made the crack-brained philosopher more and more of a burlesque unreality, continually added new touches of life and nature to the lineaments of the simple-minded soldier; and it was by this curious and half-accidental process that there came to be added to the gallery of English fiction one of the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... such strong feeling was generally manifested in Scotland against the proposed measure that it was abandoned. The relief act excited discontent in England, and protestant fanatics, encouraged by the success of their party in Scotland, agitated for its repeal. A protestant association was formed, a crack-brained member of parliament, Lord George Gordon, was made president, and a petition for the repeal of the act was signed by ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... him. Abstract sentiments of virtue do not charm me. Orange is a Roman Catholic, however, and therefore a practical idealist. The practical idealists of England are the Dissenters—mostly the Methodists. John Wesley was considered crack-brained by his contemporaries at Oxford; he was a greater mystic, in several ways, than Newman, but he was not such ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... had the men, just another five hundred," replied the Commissioner, tapping the map before him with his finger, "we should hold this country safe. But what with these restless half-breeds led by this crack-brained Riel, ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... always been somewhat prone to overvalue; but the excellent comedy of The Spanish Curate is not impaired by the fact that Dryden chose to adapt it after his own fashion in The Spanish Friar. In Wit Without Money, though it is as usual amusing, the stage preference for a "roaring boy," a senseless crack-brained spendthrift, appears perhaps a little too strongly. The Beggar's Bush is interesting because of its early indications of cant language, connecting it with Brome's Jovial Crew, and with Dekker's thieves' Latin pamphlets. But the faults and the merits ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... obsolete and exploded "superstition." Such words could answer only to ideas which a cultured man was scarcely supposed to harbor in his mind. "Magic," a synonym for jugglery; "Sorcery," an equivalent for crass ignorance; and "Occultism," the sorry relic of crack-brained, medieval Fire-philosophers, of the Jacob Boehmes and the St. Martins, are expressions believed more than amply sufficient to cover the whole field of "thimble-rigging." They are terms of contempt, and used generally only in ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... greater artist of the pair, knew that Tolstoy was on the wrong path with his crack-brained religious and social notions; knew that in his becoming the writer of illogical tracts and pamphlets, Russia was losing a great artist. What would he have said if he had lived to read the sad recantation and artistic suicide of Tolstoy: "I consign my own ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... trace the particular features, by which certain families are distinguished, up to their originals. I could plainly discover whence one family derives a long chin; why a second has abounded with knaves for two generations, and fools for two more; why a third happened to be crack-brained, and a fourth to be sharpers; whence it came, what Polydore Virgil says of a certain great house, Nec vir fortis, nec foemina casta; how cruelty, falsehood, and cowardice, grew to be characteristics by which certain ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift |
