Charlatan Quotes & Sayings

Magic is a shortened term derived from "Magiano's tricks," coined from the exploits of the famous young charlatan, Magiano, who was never captured by the Inquisition. - Essays, by Raffaele Laurent Bessette Adelina — Marie Lu

The poor wretches have convinced themselves that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, by worshipping that crucified sophist and living under his laws ... they receive these doctrines by tradition, without any definite evidence. So if any charlatan or trickster comes among them, he quickly acquires wealth by imposing upon these simple people. — Lucian

Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan. — Kurt Vonnegut

In a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan. — Andre Gide

There's no scientist I know who wouldn't rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it's great fun! — Edwin Land

Fortunately, our friend Raistlin taught me what to watch - " "Raistlin!" Flint puffed. "That pasty-faced, skinny magician. He's more than half charlatan himself. Always sniveling and whining and poking his nose where it doesn't belong. If it weren't for his twin brother looking after him, someone would've put an end to his magic long ago. — Margaret Weis

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.
If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along. — Carl Sagan

Ah Buddha, you boastful charlatan. You may have learned nothing after 6 years of suffering, but then what of 7 years? What of 17? What might you have learned from a lifetime of pain? [ ... ] From what I can tell, the wisest man in all these scriptures was the first person Buddha ever tried to teach - an Ajivika named Upaka. Buddha bragged to him of how he achieved nirvana, to which Upaka simply replied: "That may be so," and walked away. — Mark X.

Either [Jesus] was what he said he was or he was the world's greatest liar. It is impossible for me to believe a liar or charlatan could have had the effect on mankind that he has had for 2000 years. We could ask, would even the greatest of liars carry his lie through the crucifixion, when a simple confession would have saved him? ... Did he allow us the choice ... to believe in his teaching but reject his statements about his own identity? — Ronald Reagan

I hear them marvel at my work
my indignant science. I hear them call out in fear of what they see. And there are some gentlemen who doubt what I will tell them. They call me a liar and a charlatan or a quack. But in time the methods of science that I now employ to convince people will surely set them free
alas, this I cannot explain to the angry fools. (Spencer Black) — E.B. Hudspeth

feel like we're taking a bad trip down a yellow brick road, but what waits for us behind that curtain is no charlatan, rather an enormously powerful, staggeringly dangerous wizard of chaos. — Karen Marie Moning

I have been saying for many years that we are using the word 'guru' only because 'charlatan' is too long to fit into a headline. — Peter Drucker

There were others who would have called him a scammer, a swindler, a con, but he never thought of himself this way. No good charlatan ever did. — Victor LaValle

Donald Trump is an unstable charlatan who is appealing to the worst instincts in people, and I believe ultimately the American people are going to reject that. — Martin O'Malley

I finish a short afternoon shift that I spent learning about book descriptions with George. It is an arcane system that the Internet is putting paid to, where fair is foul and good is bad and perfect means you are a charlatan. Price-clipped is bad. Second impression is bad. Inscribed is bad, unless it is by the author, and then inscribed is good, but nearly as good as signed. Unless the inscription is to someone patently important - To my dear Laura, love from Petrarch. — Deborah Meyler

Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius. — Richard Flanagan

When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation ... Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame. — Laura Riding

When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan - at least in Japanese. The word shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

... Faustus ... dared to confirm he had advanced beyond the level of a scarlet sinner - he was a conscious follower of the Prince of Darkness. The fact he could publicly project an Antichrist image with pride, having no fear of reprisal, and his seeming diabolical art of escaping all punishment when others who were considered heretics had burned at the stake for less, would certainly signal that an unnatural individual walked in their midst. It is true in many respects he assumed the role of the charlatan, yet how apropos, considering his willingness to follow his 'brother-in-law' known as the Father of Lies and deception. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Cranks are much too important. They are part of the other America - Greil Marcus's old, weird America. A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America. A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who's sold out. — Charles P. Pierce

Turn over that stone" - she pointed to a flint nearby - "and you will find a charlatan who will dazzle you with the favorable conjunction of Mercury and Venus, flatter your future, and sell you colored water for a gold piece. I can't be bothered with it. From me you get the actuality. — Ariana Franklin

And, indeed, just as the most charming tune in the world becomes vulgar, intolerable, as soon as the general public is humming it, as soon as the street - organs have taken it up, the work for which charlatan art fanciers do not remain indifferent, the work which nitwits do not challenge, which is not satisfied with arousing the enthusiasm of the few, also becomes, by virtue of that very fact, corrupted, banal, almost repellent to the initiated. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan. — Christopher Hitchens

I was deeply influenced by an Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford, who in her day was quite famous as a faith healer, which is a term I've always distrusted, because it conjures up charlatanry. She was not a charlatan. She was the real thing, and she had had remarkable healings. — Frederick Buechner

Anyone who sets themselves up as an authority on life is a charlatan. — Marty Rubin

People who detest their sanity love to tell you they are insane, authors included...and all for a few bucks. Their charlatan madness is masturbation. — W.T. Shad

Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that's something I'm accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn't bother me. — Tim Ferriss

Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan. — Orson Welles

Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan. — James Gleick

An artist who conforms to conventional ideas is nothing but a mere charlatan. — Michael Bassey Johnson

We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth ... It has no day. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it. — Nicolas Chamfort

My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact. — Stephen Fry

At first, I was called a quack, a charlatan, and worse, year after year, in Australia, England and the United States, by men who simply refused to believe that a nurse from 'the bush' could devise a treatment which succeeded where they had failed. — Elizabeth Kenny

People thought I was a charlatan and a nut. The doctors were against me
they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive. — Jack LaLanne

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? — Emma Goldman

The artist in his teens who is happy is a charlatan. Life comes bursting in all around lis too suddenly, too crudely, too cruelly, for happiness. — William McFee

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon. — Joseph Brodsky

The charlatan is always the pioneer. From the astrologer came the astronomer, from the alchemist the chemist, from the mesmerist the experimental psychologist. The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow. — Arthur Conan Doyle

A general must be a charlatan. — Napoleon Bonaparte

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. — Carl Sagan

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us
and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along. — Carl Sagan

There are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot. — Russell Kirk

Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. — Arthur Schopenhauer

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant. — Oswald Spengler

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure. — Hugh Kingsmill

Herr Hitler is the very person he wants to eradicate. He might have started out with good intentions, but he is mentally unbalanced and now almost insane." "Then how come he is loved by the whole nation?" Harold interjected. "His first programs of building the Autobahn, of installing the Reichsarbeitsdienst (national labor service) were almost strokes of genius. This endeared him with our people suffering from unemployment. Then he promised things which he is unable to deliver. His hypnotic power as an orator causes the people to cheer. They don't love him. They are simply mesmerized by a charlatan. — Horst Christian

If I did only one thing at a time I'd think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud. — Peter Ackroyd

I think it's good when people don't write good things about your work. I mean, what a great compliment it is to be called a charlatan. — Julian Schnabel

He denounced him openly as a charlatan
a fraud with no valuable knowledge of any kind, or powers beyond those of an ordinary and rather inferior human being. — Mark Twain

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling. — George Eliot

I got out of the music industry many years ago. I had a charlatan for a producer who I wanted nothing to do with. He's dead now, so I guess I can't beat that horse any more. It left a very bad taste in my mouth, so I just went on about my business doing what I do and not involving myself with record companies, except for distribution. — Leon Redbone

Petermann's staunchest enemy in Great Britain was Clements R. Markham of the Royal Geographical Society. Markham had come to regard Petermann as a charlatan and a windbag. — Hampton Sides

The first thing any charlatan needs is nomenclature. A special language. Trappings. That's the true genesis of psychobabble terms such as 'disclosure' and 'in denial.' Every good con man needs plausibility ... — Andrew Vachss

The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of
it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Management who fall into this category are often so concerned about digital that they latch on to any idea, no matter how inappropriate. They want quick-fix solutions that will somehow solve digital. That makes them vulnerable to any charlatan with a digital product to sell. — Anonymous

The man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also. — Elbert Hubbard

Children are ingenuous. They are also blessed with uncanny ability to read a person's character instantly. Even though they are inexperienced and unsophisticated, they often know instinctively who can be trusted and who is the charlatan. — Wess Stafford

Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions. — Martin Amis

They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this ... because ... I am a natural-born mountebank. — George Bernard Shaw

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool. — Emil Cioran

To some Germans and, no doubt, to most foreigners it appeared that a charlatan had come to power in Berlin. To the majority of Germans Hitler had - or would shortly assume - the aura of a truly charismatic leader. They were to follow him blindly, as if he possessed a divine judgment, for the next twelve tempestuous years. — William L. Shirer

[On Jerry Falwell] No, and I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to ... The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup. — Christopher Hitchens

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading. — Leszek Kolakowski

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life ... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character. — J.B. Priestley

Earnings can be pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them. — Warren Buffett

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher ... Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius. — Henry James

The basic point of the lion's roar is that, if we are able to deal with emotions directly, able to relate with them as workable, then there is no need for external aid or explanations. It is a self-maintained situation. Any help from outsiders becomes credentials. So self-existing help develops. At that point, one does not need to avoid the credential problem any more, because there is no room for speculation or rationalization. Everything becomes obvious and immediate, workable. And there is no chance or time or space to speculate on how to become a charlatan, how to con other people, because the situation is so immediate. So the idea of charlatanism does not appear at all, because there is no room for the idea of a game. — Chogyam Trungpa

Turns out that once you kill a god, people want to talk to you. Paranormal insurance salesmen with special "godslayer" term life policies. Charlatan's with "godproof" armor and extraplanar safe houses for rent. But most notably, other gods ... — Kevin Hearne

I counted his failings in my head: his obnoxious, cocky attitude; his pierced and painted wannabe girlfriend; his leather jacket and black motorcycle; his tattoos and multiple piercings. Even his name rankled. Dante. I'd spent my formative years dodging his type. I refused to be intimidated by him. That poncy lot. I seethed some more. And geeks? Surely he could come up with something more original. My entire year's work depended on a successful outcome here, and Tristan had assured me this guy was the real deal, not just another charlatan. We only had two night's use of the control tower. As of next week, it was scheduled for demolition. I'd convinced myself Dante was just a means to an end, and then he smiled at me, his hard, uncompromising face lighting up for just a second. With his sharp cheekbones and proud chin, he looked almost beautiful, and my stomach turned cartwheels. His eyes glittered like diamonds, pale silver that appeared luminous in the badly lit room. — Sofia Grey

The reason that 'guru' is such a popular word is because 'charlatan' is so hard to spell. — William J. Bernstein