R. D. Laing Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

  R. D. Laing

  Funny, Life, Sexually Transmitted Diseases

  64 Copy quote

• A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and drugs them asleep again (increasingly effectively as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), helps to drive them crazy.

  R. D. Laing

  Crazy, Technology, People

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Lying, Suffering, Deals

  18 Copy quote

• We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

  R. D. Laing

  Infancy Is, Trance, Posts

  63 Copy quote

• Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.

  R. D. Laing

  Insane World, Break Through, Insanity

  'The Politics of Experience' (1967) ch. 6

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  'Self and Others' (1961) ch. 10

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Love Is, Thinking, Spirituality

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  11 Copy quote

• The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.

  R. D. Laing

  Patient, Traveler, Psychiatry

  22 Copy quote

• 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, Crazy, Real

  18 Copy quote

• What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism -- can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?

  R. D. Laing

  Song, Decay, Done

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.9, Penguin UK

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Nature, Class, Society

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.9, Penguin UK

  11 Copy quote

• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

  R. D. Laing

  Men, Mind, Normal

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Politics of Experience (1967) ch. 5

  7 Copy quote

• No one has the answer: we are answer and question.

  R. D. Laing

  Answers

  24 Copy quote

• Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

  R. D. Laing

  Understanding, Despair, Schizophrenia

  The Divided Self (1960) ch. 2

  15 Copy quote

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

  R. D. Laing

  Betrayal, Abdication, Normal

  44 Copy quote

• Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.

  R. D. Laing

  Names, Patient, Schizophrenia

  18 Copy quote

• The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.

  R. D. Laing

  Spring, Light, Flames

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Mind, Answers, Doubtful

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  21 Copy quote

• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Doctors, Medicine, Differences

  15 Copy quote

• Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, War, Dirty

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

  9 Copy quote

• Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.

  R. D. Laing

  Running, Men, Civilization

  24 Copy quote

• In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

  R. D. Laing

  Madness, Sanity, Ambiguous

  10 Copy quote

• We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

  R. D. Laing

  Love, Violence, Destroying Ourselves

  Politics of Experience (1967) ch. 3

  20 Copy quote

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