Mountebank Quotes & Sayings

Don't tell me what delusion he entertains regarding God, or what mountebank he follows in politics, or what he springs from, or what he submits to from his wife. Simply tell me how he makes his living. It is the safest and surest of all known tests. A man who gets his board and lodging on this ball in an ignominious way is inevitably an ignominious man. — H.L. Mencken

There will always be insatiable egotists who need to dominate and control, and there cannot be anarchy if no one follows the rules. — T. Mountebank

Hezekiah Pendergast," Constance continued, "was the great-great-grandfather of Aloysius - and a first-rate mountebank. He began his career as a snake-oil salesman for traveling medicine shows and, over time, devised his own 'medicine': Hezekiah's Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative. — Douglas Preston

Versatility is one of the few human traits which are universally intolerable. You may be good at Greek and good at painting and be popular. You may be good at Greek and good at sport, and be wildly popular. But try all three and you're a mountebank. Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all-round proficiency. — Dorothy Dunnett

And the General regrets the night. — T. Mountebank

A man's bookseller should keep his confidence, like his physician. What can become of a world where every man knows what another man reads? Why, sir, books would become like quacks' potions, with every mountebank in the newspapers claiming one volume's superiority over another. — Philip Kerr

He didn't know what beget what, but he quickly learned that people with money to hide were powerful, and powerful people were violent. It was reliable math: as the amount of money being conveyed increased, so too did the level of paranoia; the psychotic behavior of his clients increasing with every figure added to the sum. — T. Mountebank

Only two things are required to accredit
an alleged miracle: a mountebank and a crowd of spineless lookers-on. — Marquis De Sade

I'm a modern mountebank - I believe in Physiognomy - after all, we are in control of our face - it's the map of where we've been ... — John Geddes

As for being much known by sight, and pointed out, I cannot comprehend the honor that lies withal; whatsoever it be, every mountebank has it more than the best doctor. — Abraham Cowley

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest. — Pablo Picasso

Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank. — William John Locke

No man - prince, peasant, pope - has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy! — Morris West

It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women. — Marquis De Sade

I swore on my knees at the altar where you held me that I would kill you. It was an oath you made me make in my own blood. And now I have returned to give you the promised blade. — T. Mountebank

The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did. — Kurt Vonnegut

The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable. The great solitaries were happy in the old days, knew nothing of duplicity, had nothing to hide: they conversed only with their own solitude. — Emil Cioran

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

To be in the present seemed meaningless in practice when the present was merely the place in which to plan for the future or review the past. — T. Mountebank