My family has always believed that when we are faced with large and apparently impossible problems, the best solutions are found by the insane people, not the sensible ones.

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

Psychiatrists were presumed to be more entitled to eccentricities than ordinary folks.

That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

Life in the [London] suburb is richer at the lower levels. At these levels the people are not self-conscious at all, they are at liberty to be as eccentric as they please, they do not know that they are eccentric.

More cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths.

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained.

We might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others.

Once I knew a dumb girl in the office at the zipper factory who filled in all the four letter words of the easy home-town puzzle. SHIT she wrote when she could not guess the answer.

They are explosive mixtures. Some of them are as sensitive as those fulminates which can be detonated by a falling leaf.