Quotes / You Have to Believe Me!

"I have to blow everything up! It's the only way to prove I'm not crazy!"

— Gordon Freeman on why he's detonating a stockpile of explosives via grenade, Freeman's Mind

"Scully, you have to believe me. No one else on this whole damn planet does or ever will. You're my one in five billion."

— Fox Mulder, The X-Files, "Folie a Deux"

"Our wives, our children, everyone! They're here already! You're next! You're next!"

— Dr. Miles Bennell trying to convince random people that he's not crazy, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Rasoul: How very convenient.
Aladdin: It's the truth! Why won't you believe me?
Jafar, disguised as Jasmine: Because we know you're lying.

— Aladdin: The Return of Jafar

"Why won't anyone believe my crazy story?"

— Homer Simpson, The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror VII"

'Oh,...what's the use? Let's face it. If I saw someone speaking as I have, I'd think they were insane, too!"

— Old woman in Odegan, Shining Wisdom

I AM NOT CRAZY! I am dating a supermodel zoologist, whom I stole away from a professional football player, and she is off to the Galapagos Islands to artificially inseminate iguanas! Is that so hard to believe?!

— Frasier Crane, Frasier, "Imaginary Friends"

The Kikiwaka really does exist! We saw it!

— Ravi Ross, Bunk'd, "Waka, Waka, Waka!"

I try to call you every day
I'm rehearsing what to say
When the truth comes out (Of my very own mouth)
I've been working on a unified theory
If I make it through tonight, everybody's gonna hear me out!

— Lemon Demon, "Touch-Tone Telephone"

"We are right, and we're not crazy. And if we've been seeing things, it's because we did see them."

— Ellen Fields, It Came from Outer Space

"Sometimes improbable patient reports are erroneously assumed to be symptoms of mental illness. The ‘Martha Mitchell effect’ referred to the tendency of mental health practitioners not to believe the experience of the wife of the American attorney general, whose persistent reports of corruption in the Nixon White House were initially dismissed as evidence of delusional thinking, until later proved correct by the Watergate investigation. Such examples demonstrate that delusional pathology can often lie in the failure or inability to verify whether the events have actually taken place, no matter how improbable intuitively they might appear to the busy clinician. Clearly, there are instances ‘where people are pursued by the Mafia’ or are ‘kept under surveillance by the police’, and where they rightly suspect ‘that their spouse is unfaithful’. As Joseph H. Berke wrote, even paranoids have enemies! For understandable and obvious reasons, however, little effort is invested by clinicians into checking the validity of claims of persecution or harassment, and without such evidence the patient could be labelled delusional."

—Vaughan Bell, Peter W. Halligan, and Hadyn Ellis, The Psychologist scientific journal, August 2003, "Beliefs About Delusions"

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