"The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts"
About this Quote
Progress rarely comes from the well-adjusted. Sturgeon’s line lands with a wink, but it’s not just a punchline at ambition’s expense; it’s an x-ray of how change actually gets made. “Movers and shakers” is the polite phrase we use for people who bend institutions, markets, or taste. Sturgeon yanks the velvet rope aside and replaces it with “obsessive nuts,” a deliberately ungentle label that punctures the myth of the visionary as balanced, enlightened, and socially seamless.
The intent is to reframe obsession as the hidden engine of influence. Innovation demands a tolerance for repetition, loneliness, and disproportionate investment. The subtext: the traits we pathologize in ordinary life (fixation, stubbornness, tunnel vision) become virtues when they yield a startup, a novel, a scientific breakthrough, a movement. Sturgeon isn’t romanticizing dysfunction so much as pointing out the bargain society makes: we reward results, then retroactively sanitize the temperament that produced them.
Context matters. As a science fiction writer working in mid-century America, Sturgeon lived among people whose careers often depended on being out of step with consensus reality. SF has always been a genre built by monomaniacs: world-builders, systems-thinkers, the kind of minds that worry a problem until it confesses. The line also carries a warning. If the drivers of history are “nuts,” then power is not inherently wise; it’s frequently just intensely motivated. That’s both funny and unsettling, which is why it sticks.
The intent is to reframe obsession as the hidden engine of influence. Innovation demands a tolerance for repetition, loneliness, and disproportionate investment. The subtext: the traits we pathologize in ordinary life (fixation, stubbornness, tunnel vision) become virtues when they yield a startup, a novel, a scientific breakthrough, a movement. Sturgeon isn’t romanticizing dysfunction so much as pointing out the bargain society makes: we reward results, then retroactively sanitize the temperament that produced them.
Context matters. As a science fiction writer working in mid-century America, Sturgeon lived among people whose careers often depended on being out of step with consensus reality. SF has always been a genre built by monomaniacs: world-builders, systems-thinkers, the kind of minds that worry a problem until it confesses. The line also carries a warning. If the drivers of history are “nuts,” then power is not inherently wise; it’s frequently just intensely motivated. That’s both funny and unsettling, which is why it sticks.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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