R. D. Laing Quotes - Page 3

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• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Love, Mother, Baby

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

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

  R. D. Laing

  Reason, Obedient

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• The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.

  R. D. Laing

  Yesterday, Intellectual, Machines

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• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Pain, Bipolar, Trying

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• To mystify, in the active sense, is to befuddle, cloud, obscure, mask whatever is going on, whether this be experience, action, or process, or whatever is "the issue." It induces confusion in the sense that there is failure to see what is "really" being experienced, or being done, or going on, and failure to distinguish or discriminate the actual issues. This entails the substitution of false for true constructions of what is being experienced, being done (praxis), or going on (process), and the substitution of false issues for the actual issues.

  R. D. Laing

  Clouds, Issues, Confusion

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• Before one goes through the gate one may not be aware there is a gate One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gate

  R. D. Laing

  Thinking, Self, Long

  R. D. Laing (2008). “Knots”, p.194, Marbot Ediciones

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• Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.

  R. D. Laing

  Philosophy, Doe, Abstraction

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• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Thinking, Smell, Self

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.19, Penguin UK

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• The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality',than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, People, Labels

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• I am quite sure that a good number of "cures" of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to play at being sane.

  R. D. Laing

  Play, Numbers, Insanity

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

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Parent, Relation

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.61, Penguin UK

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

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Men, Normal

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

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• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Break Through, Diversity, May

  Politics of Experience (1967) ch. 6

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• Any experience of reality is indescribable!

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, Indescribable

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• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Inspirational, Creativity, People

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

  R. D. Laing

  Honesty, Ethics, Absolution

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• A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.

  R. D. Laing

  May, Psychiatrist, Healer

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• When I go beyond a certain range it's outside of my direct horizon therefore I've got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people that I know.... I've got to try to piece together some tentative information picture of what the whole thing is like, but I'm aware that it becomes more and more speculative as it becomes more and more second, third, fourth hand. And this applies to absolutely everyone.

  R. D. Laing

  Communication, Writing, Hands

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• 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, Imbeciles, Fool

  "The Politics of Experience". Book by Ronald David Laing, p. 58, 1967.

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• 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

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

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• 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, Facts

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

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• What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

  R. D. Laing

  Understanding, Defining, Description

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• 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. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see of we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence.

  R. D. Laing

  Hero, Medusa, Benefits

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• Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.

  R. D. Laing

  Depression, Mad, Religion

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• No one acts or experiences in a vacuum.

  R. D. Laing

  Vacuums

  R.D. LAING (1969). “SELF AND OTHERS”

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