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Quotes About Quackery

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Those who condemn the supreme certainty of mathematics feed on confusion, and can never silence the contradictions of the sophistical sciences which lead to eternal quackery.
~ Leonardo da Vinci
When patients reject official advice and proved medicine, they become more susceptible to quackery.
~ Carl Hart
He had Oly letter a little card that he taped on his wall. The thing read, 'The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.' Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.
~ Katherine Dunn
Ich bin ein Wirtschaftler und erkläre Ihnen: Die Gegenwartskrise ohne eine vorherige Erneuerung des Geistes ökonomisch lösen zu wollen, ist Quacksalberei!
~ Erich Kastner
Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I'm happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery.
~ Timothy Noah
I am as non-accepting of medical quackery and unscientific approaches as anybody else. I've grown up as a card-carrying scientist, and I know the power of science to answer questions, and for many questions I don't know of anything better than scientific approaches to answer them.
~ Dean Ornish
Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel's widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need the supplement of quackery.
~ George Eliot
Any physician who advertises a positive cure for any disease, who issues nostrum testimonials, who sells his services to a secret remedy, or who diagnoses and treats by mail patients he has never seen, is a quack.
~ Samuel Hopkins Adams
"Lambe them, lads! lambe them!" a cant phrase of the time derived from the fate of Dr. Lambe, an astrologer and quack, who was knocked on the head by the rabble in Charles the First's time.
~ Walter Scott
She was as simple-hearted and honest as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim. She gathered together her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and thus armed with death, went about on her pale horse, metaphorically speaking, with hell following after.
~ Mark Twain
Covid quackery, climate denial, and conspiracy theories are symptoms of what some are calling an epistemological crisis and a post-truth era.
~ Steven Pinker
Ever-creative Homo sapiens had long fought back against disease with quackery such as prayer, sacrifice, bloodletting, cupping, toxic metals, homeopathy, and squeezing a hen to death against an infected body part.
~ Steven Pinker
Although millions of Americans purr with pastel delusions of Mohandas K. Gandhi, those who actually live in the scrawny crank's homeland struggle to throw off the painful aftermath of his quackery.
~ Emmett Tyrrell
At another time, or in another case, it might have excited my ridicule. But into what quackeries will not people rush for a last chance, where all accustomed means have failed, and the life of a beloved object is at stake?
~ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.
~ Henry David Thoreau
I already knew the incredible profits in chemotherapy, and how those profits led to an insidious push for that treatment: when patients suggested another approach, physicians could be condescending, dismissing alternatives as risky, unproven, even quackery.
~ Mitch Albom
But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in political economy and social science. It
~ William Graham Sumner
Quack: A boastful pretender to arts which he does not understand. A vain boastful pretender to physick; An artful, tricking practitioner in physick.
~ Samuel Johnson
Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.
~ Thomas Carlyle
At the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, a man dressed as a cowboy appeared onstage and strangled rattlesnakes by the dozen. He called what came out of them snake oil. People bought it. Of course quacks have flourished in all ages and cultures, for nothing shows reason the door like cures for things. Unlike most scams, which target greed, quackery fires deeper into Jungian universals: our fear of death, our craving for miracles. When we see night approaching, nearly all of us are rubes.
~ Unknown
if I think (and I do) that Deepak Chopra talks nonsense when he tells people about quantum mechanical elixirs of youth, I would first have to be an expert in quantum mysticism. But the problem is that quantum mysticism is (I think) quackery, and that therefore there is no such thing as an "expert" on quantum mysticism.
~ Massimo Pigliucci
These days (as those few physicians who try actively to fight quackery have found to their sorrow), it is nearly impossible to deprive a doctor of his license to practice for anything so problematical as mere scientific heterodoxy. To fly by the seat of one's pants, espousing or devising nostrums as one chooses, without regard to scientific validity, is an open option. The stock of patients who can be recruited by the force of personality or the lure of hope is essentially limitless.
~ Unknown