R. D. Laing famous quotes

In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.
-- R. D. Laing

#Our Society #Lost #Ritual

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
-- R. D. Laing

#Depression #Insanity #Bipolar

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
-- R. D. Laing

#Funny #Life #Disease

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.
-- R. D. Laing

#Civilization #Destruction #Driven

A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
-- R. D. Laing

#Children #Taken #Mad

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
-- R. D. Laing

#Children #Learning #Men

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
-- R. D. Laing

#Life #Success #Disease

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
-- R. D. Laing

#Needs #May #Madness

Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.
-- R. D. Laing

#Dream #Real #Crazy

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.
-- R. D. Laing

#Change #Historical #Aging

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
-- R. D. Laing

#Fate #Destiny #Diversity

Any experience of reality is indescribable!
-- R. D. Laing

#Reality

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.
-- R. D. Laing

#People #Guilt #Assuming

The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.
-- R. D. Laing

#Freedom #Blow #Men

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
-- R. D. Laing

#Diversity #Political #Labels

Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
-- R. D. Laing

#Pain #Life Is #This Life

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
-- R. D. Laing

#Understanding #Despair #Schizophrenia

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
-- R. D. Laing

#Love #Violence #Destroying

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.
-- R. D. Laing

#Spiritual #Loneliness #Anxiety

What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience...It is radically estranged from the structure of being ...
-- R. D. Laing

#Depression #Denial #Normal

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.
-- R. D. Laing

#Beauty #Lying #Reality

Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
-- R. D. Laing

#Betrayal #Abdication #Normal

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
-- R. D. Laing

#Life #Science #Order

Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.
-- R. D. Laing

#Book #Race #Perfect

Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.
-- R. D. Laing

#Self #Way #Behavior

The way out is through the door you came in.
-- R. D. Laing

#Healing #Doors #Way

Few books today are forgivable.
-- R. D. Laing

#Book #Today

How do we define, how do we describe, how do we explain and/or understand ourselves? What sort of creatures do we take ourselves to be? What are we? Who are we? Why are we? How do we come to be what or who we are or take ourselves to be? How do we give an account of ourselves? How do we account for ourselves, our actions, interactions, transactions (praxis), our biologic processes? Our specific human existence?
-- R. D. Laing

#Giving #Our Actions #Who We Are

In certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation performed which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery, confusion, disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an unearthly light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation from his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than he. It may burn him out.
-- R. D. Laing

#Believe #Men #Sight

I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not.
-- R. D. Laing

#Ridiculous #Feels

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
-- R. D. Laing

#Spiritual #Thinking #Failing