R. D. Laing Quotes

65 quotes in 922 categories

• The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.
• From the moment of birth, when the Stone-Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence called love, as…
• We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
• The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
• 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…
• 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…
• Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.
• 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…
• 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…
• We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from…
• Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
• If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know I know, I think I don't know.
• What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession.
• True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and…
• Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.
• 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.
• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.
• There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.
• 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…

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