"Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it"
About this Quote
The Napoleon comparison does double duty. It’s funny in the dark way good biography can be: the image of someone bankrolling their own hallucination is absurd. But it’s also diagnostic. Delusion is usually defined by the gap between belief and reality; Morgan points out that money can shrink that gap by hiring reality’s stagehands. If you can employ assistants, doctors, pilots, publicists, and enforcers to orbit your conviction, the world begins to comply. You stop being “a man who thinks” and become a man who “proves,” at least socially.
The subtext is about power’s ability to launder the unacceptable into the merely eccentric. Hughes’s real-life seclusion, obsessive control, and elaborate protocols were enabled by a fortune and a culture that mistook dominance for genius and privacy for mystique. Morgan isn’t romanticizing the “mad billionaire”; he’s indicting the ecosystem that allows pathology to masquerade as sovereignty. The punchline leaves a bruise: when money can hire an army, even madness can win a referendum.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Morgan, Ted. (2026, January 16). Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/howard-hughes-was-able-to-afford-the-luxury-of-132378/
Chicago Style
Morgan, Ted. "Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/howard-hughes-was-able-to-afford-the-luxury-of-132378/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/howard-hughes-was-able-to-afford-the-luxury-of-132378/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.
