Quotes About Quacks

Ben Franklin said it well: "Quacks are the greatest liars in the world, except their patients.

In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.

The Turing Test – the sort of thing that only a demented empiricist could devise – is one of the silliest tests ever to be taken seriously as a test. It's equivalent to saying, "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck" – even though we know it's actually a machine-duck with no organic parts, which we have painstakingly programmed to exhibit duck behavior … to quack like a duck.

How do you suppose we'd go about finding one?" she asked. "A psychiatrist, I mean. Aren't a lot of them supposed to be quacks? Well, but still, I guess that isn't really much of a problem, is it.

While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, The fate of empires and the fall of kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp the Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention.

the leadership industry also has its share of quacks and sham artists who sell promises and stories, some true, some not, but all of them inspirational and comfortable, with not much follow-up to see what really does work and what doesn't.

No disorders have employed so many quacks, as those that have no cure; and no sciences have exercised so many quills, as those that have no certainty.

Laws should be made, not against quacks but against superstition.

Mathematics is the summit of human thinking. It has all the creativity and imagination that you can find in all kinds of art, but unlike art-charlatans and all kinds of quacks will not succeed there.

Most of the private "physicians" visited by the people we talked to in Rajasthan were not qualified doctors but quacks of one kind or another—what in Rajasthan are slightingly referred to as "Bengali doctors.

Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?

Most allopathic doctors think practitioners of alternative medicine are all quacks. They're not. Often they're sharp people who think differently about disease.

What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities.

Laws should be made, not against quacks but against superstition.

Reading through the newspapers and medical journals of the day, what stands out is not just the breadth of remedies proposed, but the breadth of people involved in the discussion: surgeons, nurses, patent medicine quacks, public-health authorities, armchair chemists, all writing the Times and the Globe (or buying classified advertising there) with news of the dependable cure they had concocted.

So many low income people have seen so many failed promises broken and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them that building trust takes a lot of time, takes a lot of patience.

I needed to keep my ears open for signs of mischief from woodwork-destroying parakeets, or from quacks of distress from an outdoor duck that had fallen afoul of its flock.

What's the difference between physics and psychiatry? One's full of quarks, and the other's full of quacks.

Projectors, Brokers of Capital, Insurancers, Peddlers upon the global Scale, Enterprisers and Quacks,— these are the last poor fallen and feckless inheritors of a knowledge they can never use, but in the service of Greed.

Quacks pretend to cure other men's disorders, but fail to find a remedy for their own.

I don't believe that Nature's powers Have tied her hands or pinioned ours, By marking on the heavenly vault Our fate without mistake or fault. That fate depends on conjunctions Of places, persons, times, and tracks, And not on the functions Of more or less of quacks.

Such people there are living and flourishing in the world - Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful too, mere quacks and fools: and it was to combat and expose such as those, no doubt, that Laughter was made

I know we must always watch out for 'quacks,' however, most people do not realize that many of the most dangerous, outrageous therapies are the ones approved by the 'traditional' medicine establishment.

There is actually quite a lot of crossover between the quacks and drug companies. They use the same tricks and tactics to bamboozle people into buying their pills, but drug firms can afford to use slightly more sophisticated versions.