Beautiful coquettes are quacks of love. [ Rochefoucauld ]

No class escapes them - from the poor man's pay
The nostrum takes no trifling part away;
Time, too, with cash is wasted; 'tis the fate
Of real helpers, to be called too late;
This find the sick, when time and patience gone
Death with a tenfold terror hurries on. [ Crabbe ]

Void of all honor, avaricious, rash.
The daring tribe compound their boasted trash -
Tincture of syrup, lotion, drop, or pill:
All tempt the sick to trust the lying bill. [ Crabbe ]

From powerful causes spring the empiric's gains.
Man's love of life, his weakness, and his pains;
These first induce him the vile trash to try,
Then lend his name that other men may buy. [ Crabbe ]

I have heard they are the most lewd impostors,
Made of all terms and shreds, no less beliers
Of great men's favours than their own vile medicines,
Which they will utter upon monstrous oaths;
Selling that drug for two pence ere they part.
Which they have valued at twelve crowns before. [ Ben Jonson ]

Take the humbug out of this world, and you haven't much left to do business with. [ H. W. Shaw ]

Quacks pretend to cure other men's disorders, but fail to find a remedy for their own. [ Cicero ]

We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison; let the vender prove it to be sanative. [ Macaulay ]

Out, you impostors, quack-salving, cheating mountebanks! Your skill is to make sound men sick, and sick men kill. [ Massinger ]

Literature has her quacks no less than medicine: those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth. [ Colton ]

When a man puts on a character he is a stranger to, there is as much difference between what he appears and what he is in reality as there is between a visor and a face. [ Bruyere ]

To elevate and surprise is the great art of quackery and puffing; to raise a lively and exaggerated image in the mind, and take it by surprise before it can recover breath. [ Hazlitt ]

Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men. [ Thoreau ]

Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in; the reign of quacks has not ended with the nineteenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp; the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. Indeed, one portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other. [ Carlyle ]