Lunacy Quotes

• Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy.

  Rebecca West

  Males, Female, Idiocy

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.7, Open Road Media

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• What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

  George Orwell

  Intelligent, Giving, Atheism

  George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.354, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.

  William Ralph Inge

  Patriotic, Patriotism, Noble

  William Ralph Inge (1920). “Outspoken Essays”

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• Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

  George Orwell

  Insanity, Minorities, Lunatic

  George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.182, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The nicest people fall in love indiscriminately ... while under the influence of that pre-eminently selfish lunacy they may make the most outrageous demands upon their friends with no other excuse than their painful need.

  Margery Allingham

  Falling In Love, Selfish, People

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

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• To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.

  David Brooks

  Atheist, Religion, Atheism

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• In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Insane, Behaviour, World

  "The 100 best nonfiction books: No24 - The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. July 11, 2016.

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• Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

  Edward Dahlberg

  Men, People, Mad

  Edward Dahlberg (1968). “The Carnal Myth: A Search Into Classical Sensuality”, New York : Weybright and Talley

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• Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth.

  Timothy Radcliffe

  War, Believe, Lasts

  Timothy Radcliffe (2005). “What is the Point of Being a Christian?”, p.114, A&C Black

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• Every anxiety is a mild form of premonition, and from that point the shade deepens till we get the forebodings and hauntings that merge into lunacy.

  Arthur Alfred Lynch

  Anxiety, Haunting, Shade

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• Oh, all kinds of lunacy happens in Ireland, all kinds of lunacy.

  Anjelica Huston

  Kind, Happens, Ireland

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• Of lunacy,
  Innumerous were the causes; humbled pride,
  Ambition disappointed, riches lost,
  And bodily disease, and sorrow, oft
  By man inflicted on his brother man;
  Sorrow, that, made the reason drunk, and yet
  Left much untasted. So the cup was fill'd.

  Robert Pollok

  Brother, Ambition, Pride

  Robert Pollok, James Robert Boyd (1860). “Pollok's Course of Time”, p.304

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• This book is dedicated to you. Whether you are a Minion or a Skuttlebug or just, you know, a normal person, it’s because of you that I get to do what I love and laughingly call it work. I know some of you by name and some of you by sight (and some of you by smell, but let’s not get into that) but there are still countless others I have never met, and to all of you I say thank you for your support, your passion, and your lunacy.

  Derek Landy

  Book, Passion, Sight

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• Golf is a terrible, hopeless addiction, it seems: it makes its devotees willing to trudge miles in any manner of weather, lugging a huge, incommodious and appallingly heavy bag with them, in pursuit of a tiny and fantastically expensive ball, in a fanatical attempt to direct it into a hole the size of a beer glass half a mile away. If anything could be better calculated to convince one of the essential lunacy of the human race, I haven't found it.

  Mike Seabrook

  Beer, Golf, Glasses

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• Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.

  Megan Chance

  Calling, Easier

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• The human race has today the means for annihilating itself--either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war...or by the careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.

  Max Born

  Peace, War, Mean

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• If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.

  Noam Chomsky

  Accepting, Rational, Policy

  Source: www.madre.org

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• If there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational. Because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy.

  Noam Chomsky

  Zero, Grandchildren, Space

  Source: www.madre.org

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• Older generations are living proof that younger generations can survive their lunacy.

  Cullen Hightower

  Generations, Proof, Older Generation

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• I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Believe, Next Day, One Day

  "Poetry Questions: Stephen Dobyns" by Rebecca Foresman, www.newyorker.com. April 2, 2012.

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• with the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy.

  John Kennedy Toole

  Taste, Chaos, Medieval

  John Kennedy Toole (2004). “A Confederacy of Dunces”, p.41, LSU Press

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• From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Law, Criminals, Problem

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• The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

  Rebecca West

  Fate, Men, Cells

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.7, Open Road Media

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• She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Odds, Worry, Stupidity

  Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.225, A&C Black

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• Concerning alchemy it is more difficult to discover the actual state of things, in that the historians who specialise in this field seem sometimes to be under the wrath of God themselves; for, like those who write of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy or on Spanish politics, they seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Writing, Wrath, Fields

  Herbert Butterfield (1997). “The Origins of Modern Science”, p.141, Simon and Schuster

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