R.D. Laing Quotes
Women receive he insults of men with tolerance, having been bitten in the nipple by their toothless gums.
Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.
Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.
Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.
The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.
When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies.
A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.
Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.
True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
If I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another.
The human mind has to ask "Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?" And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.
What we think is less than what we know; What we know is less than what we love; What we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.
In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.