Quackery Quotes

We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun.

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks.

The world will go on much as it did before; and be always quite bad enough to allow bribery and corruption, jobbery and nepotism, quackery and arrogance, their full influence over our home and foreign policy.

Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.

… much like the cure-all theory of patent medicine.

(about Dr. Po) Just another quack spouting psychobabble.

Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I'm happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery.

Often, some people dress something up to make it sound scientific, use scientific words, call themselves doctor something-or-other, and then you look them up, and they're trying to make it sound like something it's not. There's this entire field that's adding the word 'quantum' to everything. It doesn't even make sense in that context.

Tinkers may work, quacks may prescribe, and demagogues may deceive, but I declare to you that there is no remedy for us ... but in adhering to the Constitution.

That's all we had when I was a kid: Robitussin. No matter what you got, Robitussin better handle it. "Daddy, I got asthma." "Robitussin." "I got cancer." "Robitussin." "I broke my leg." Daddy poured Robitussin on it. "Yeah, boy, let that 'tussin get in there. Yeah, boy, let that 'tussin get on down to the bone. The 'tussin ought to straighten out the bone."

Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way

Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.

This warning from the New York City Department of Health Fraud: Be suspicious of any doctor who tries to take your temperature with his finger.

Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in; the reign of quacks has not ended with the nineteenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp; the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. Indeed, one portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other.

Part of the problem is how little we understand about the ultimate betrayal of the body when it rebels against itself. You always worry about charlatans. We found that specialists did not know as much as we thought.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

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?

Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers.

[Children] are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack.