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[A]s we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
--
"The Quack Detector", p. 245

 

Stephen Jay Gould

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On a very rough-and-ready basis 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. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit […] Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

 

Louis Kronenberger

 

So much fantasy relies on the author's having read Fraser's The Golden Bough or Robert Graves' The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything.

 

Elizabeth Hand

 

Put ya shoulder to the handle, if ya dare, and hoist that bucket hither,
Crank'n'hoist'n'hoist'n'crank, till ya muscles waste'n'wither.

 

Nick Cave

 

A lot of people say there's a fine line between genius and insanity. I don't think there's a fine line, I actually think there's a yawning gulf. You see some poor bugger scuffling up the road with balloons tied to his ears, he's not going home to invent a rocket, is he?

 

Bill Bailey

 

We want the mathematical genius - there is work for him. We want the literary genius - there is work for him, especially in my office. We want the scientific brain - there is more than enough work for him. We want the man of brains and we want the man of common sense and little brain. We want the man of initiative and the man of action, the methodical man and even the crank. We open our ranks widely to all.

 

Hugh Trenchard