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A successful crackpot is still a crackpot.

— John W. Campbell

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More quotes by John W. Campbell

The world’s prize stupid oaf is the man who thinks he already has all the answers.

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.

Analog Science Fiction/Fact magazine (1965)

The curve of progress in the physical sciences is, assuredly, still rising rapidly. But I wonder how fast the curve of human-effort-invested-per-discovery-achieved is rising?

Logic happens to be one of the levels of reality; ignoring it is perfectly possible, just as it is possible for a drunken driver to ignore the concrete-and-steel bridge abutment in his path. The difficulty is that logic—like the bridge-abutment—won’t ignore the individual man.

Hypnosis has been a seriously neglected factor of the human mind; now it must be attacked as a major engineering problem. For once, we have an aspect of the mind that ties directly into a solid engineering job; it will require that psychology submit to that harshest of all disciplines—the absolutely inflexible, utterly autocratic, uncompromisingly dogmatic discipline of “Does it work?”

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John W. Campbell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.