"Crack-brained" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... score of other business veins it is not so easy to dispel suspicion. This war has been a shock to reasonable men the whole world over. They have been forced to realise that after all a great number of Germans have been engaged in a crack-brained conspiracy against the non-German world; that in a great number of cases when one does business with a German the business does not end with the individual German. We hated to believe that a business could be tainted by German partners or German associations. If now we err on the side of ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... amusing queries,—Whether the persons that ordered the building of it, or those that inhabit it, were the maddest? and, whether the name and thing be not as disagreeable as harp and harrow." By another—the no less facetious Ned Ward—it was termed, "A costly college for a crack-brained society, raised in a mad age, when the chiefs of the city were in a great danger of losing their senses, and so contrived it the more noble for their own reception; or they would never have flung away so much money to so foolish ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... still such an event is well within the bounds of possibility, for our reasoning faculties are like powder, which, though it catches fire easily, will never catch fire at all without a spark. The book of the Spanish nun has all the properties necessary to make a man crack-brained; but for the poison to take effect he must be isolated, put under the Leads, and deprived of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... that evening in a trailing blaze of glory Denver Russell came out and sat with bared arms, looking lazily down at the town. The news of his strike had roused them at last, these easy-going, do-nothing old-timers; and now, from an outcast, a crack-brained hobo miner, he was suddenly accepted as an equal. They spoke to him, they recognized him, they rushed up to his mine and stared at the ore he had dug; and even the Professor had purloined a specimen to take over and show to Murray. And all because, ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... what the law terms a "spinster." She is a sad old girl, presides with timidity and hesitation, is wheezy and nasal in her pronunciation and wholly without dignity or command.... Mummified and fossilated females, void of domestic duties, habits and natural affections; crack-brained, rheumatic, dyspeptic, henpecked men, vainly striving to achieve the liberty of opening their heads in presence of their wives; self-educated, oily-faced, insolent, gabbling negroes, and Theodore Tilton, make up the less ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of it, there was great excitement in London. Lord George Gordon, a well-meaning but crack-brained nobleman, led astray by flatterers till he believed he had a God-given mission to drive all Catholics out of England, had, sometime before this, begun to hold meetings and to stir up the people with the cry ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... bitter pill indeed; upon associations and reforms, clubs, gaming-houses, aristocratic cabals, &c., &c.; together with much inquiry into the state of Ireland, and the characters and conduct of people there; and a long detail about Lord Bellamont, who he believed was crack-brained, and of whom he told two curious stories of audiences which he had asked, and in which he at last insisted that, unless the King would make him reparation for the second disgrace he had suffered by the nomination of Lord Arran, by suffering him ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... up in the Utraquist Faith; he took the sacrament every Sunday in the famous old Thein Church; and there he heard the preacher declare that the priests in Prague cared for nothing but comfort, and that the average Christians of the day were no better than crack-brained heathen sprinkled with holy water. The young man was staggered; he consulted other priests, and the others told him the same dismal tale. One lent him a pamphlet, entitled "The Antichrist"; another lent him a treatise ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... 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 broidering garments ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... far more extravagant in a later attempt which he made to expound the odd visions of a crack-brained Welshman, a prophesying knave; a knave by his own confession, and a prophet by Warburton's. This commentary, inserted in Jortin's "Remarks on Ecclesiastical History," considerably injured the reputation ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 of Fletcher have scarcely found better ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... be by profession a schoolmaster. There was a certain air of exaggerated earnestness of demeanour about him, and a wildness of expression in his flashing coal-black eyes, that caused me to set him down as being somewhat crack-brained. His name, I soon ascertained, was Algernon Marcus Wilde, and he was among the first of the emigrants to speak to me. He came to me, on the morning after I joined the ship, with a complaint as to the quality and quantity of the food ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... time, however, before Jan went back to his threshing. To him this, too, was a finger-pointing. Not that a crack-brained person like Ingeborg could know anything of Glory Goldie's movements; but she was one of the kind who sensed it in the air when something extraordinary was going to happen. She could see and hear things of which wise folk never ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... was gone, I at once urged the Professor to explain to me what Krespel had to do with violins, and particularly with Antonia. "Well," replied the Professor, "not only is the Councillor a remarkably eccentric fellow altogether, but he practises violin-making in his own crack-brained way." "Violin-making!" I exclaimed, perfectly astonished. "Yes," continued the Professor, "according to the judgment of men who understand the thing, Krespel makes the very best violins that can be found nowadays; formerly he would frequently ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... But it is also certain that he will die early; and more than likely that he will come to grief, when he has lost his nerve, in one or other of the mad exploits which he will be too proud to discontinue. Then will your Richard become the most assiduous and painstaking of nurses that ever humored crack-brained patient. But there! I have made a dozen programmes of what is to happen, and this is but a specimen. Who can tell? I may be heir of Crompton yet, or I may come back to you to-morrow like a bad penny, and with what the vulgar describe as a flea ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... they are all crack-brained," thought Mrs. Cliff, as she went to the front door to ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... more capable of being instructed than others, it is incredible that the most perfect ape or parrot of its species, should not in this be equal to the most stupid infant of its kind or at least to one that was crack-brained, unless the soul of brutes were of a nature wholly different from ours. And we ought not to confound speech with the natural movements which indicate the passions, and can be imitated by machines as well as manifested by animals; nor must it be thought ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... e'en as I tell ye. He's no a'thegither sae void o' sense neither; he has a gloaming sight o' what's reasonable—that is anes and awa'—a glisk and nae mair; but he's crack-brained and cockle-headed about his nipperty-tipperty poetry nonsense—He'll glowr at an auld-warld barkit aik-snag as if it were a queezmaddam in full bearing; and a naked craig, wi' a bum jawing ower't, is unto him as a garden garnisht ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... possibilities of "My Uncle Toby" and "Corporal Trim," and had 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
... "That crack-brained lad seems to be the pivot on which the whole thing turns. Curious, isn't it? I wish the responsibility hadn't been laid on my shoulders. Just now I can't tell what I ought ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss |
