R. D. Laing Quotes

If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

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.

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

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.

When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.

In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.

Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.

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.

No one acts or experiences in a vacuum.

Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.

A lot of the time I'm in the present, and I'm thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment.

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

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.

The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.

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.

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

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.

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

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon.

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 its father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.

Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.

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 through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.

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.

Few books today are forgivable.

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

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.

Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.

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.

The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data.

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

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

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.

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.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.

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.

Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.

The way out is through the door you came in.