Lunatic Asylums Quotes

• My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Views, Planets, Used

  "God Is Not Great". Book by Christopher Hitchens, www.theguardian.com. 2011.

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• The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

  Havelock Ellis

  Depression, Optimism, Psychology

  Dance of Life (1923) ch. 3

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• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Funny, Faith, Witty

  "The Antichrist". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1888.

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• The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Military, Believe, Army

  Orthodoxy (1908) ch. 2

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• The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.

  Thomas Paine

  Religious, Bipolar, Religion

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• The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Education, Children, Growing Up

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.63, Penguin

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• Hollywood is a cross between a health farm, a recreation center and an insane asylum. It's a company town, and I happen to like the company!

  Michael Caine

  Insane, Hollywood, Towns

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• It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.

  Mike Royko

  Views, Bipolar, Information

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• Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Birthday, Dream, Time

  Soren Kierkegaard (1946). “Either/or”

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• When a man says that he is perfect already, there is only one of two places for him, and that is heaven or the lunatic asylum.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Men, Two, Perfect

  Henry Ward Beecher (1871). “The Plymouth pulpit. Sermons preached in Plymouth church, Brooklyn”, p.310

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• Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

  Virginia Woolf

  Women, Home, House

  The Common Reader "Lady Dorothy Nevill" (1925) See Crisp 2; Hemans 3

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• It seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate.

  James Bryant Conant

  Inmates, Seems, Asylums

  1950 Of Washington. Letter to Bernard Baruch, Feb. Quoted in James G Hershberg James B Conant (1993).

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• I do not oppose the insane asylum - but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community.

  Eugene V. Debs

  Men, Community, Insanity

  "What's the Matter with Chicago?" by Eugene V. Debs in "Chicago Socialist", www.marxists.org. October 25, 1902.

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• Science is about finding ever better approximations rather than pretending you have already found ultimate truth.
  A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Religion, Doe, Pretending

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• I become more convinced that beings from other planets are using the Earth as a lunatic asylum

  George Bernard Shaw

  Clever, Earth, Planets

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• The universities are a sort of lunatic asylum for keeping young men out of mischief.

  Mandell Creighton

  Education, Men, Young

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• There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.

  Carl Jung

  Men, Would Be, Extroverts

  Richard Isadore Evans, Carl Gustav Jung, Ernest Jones (1964). “Conversations with Carl [Gustav] Jung and reactions from Ernest Jones”, Princeton, N.J., Van Nostrand

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• A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Land, Done

  A Little Book in C Major ch. 3 (1916)

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• The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Used, Planets, Convinced

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• When Švejk subsequently described life in the lunatic asylum, he did so in exceptionally eulogistic terms: 'I really don't know why those loonies get so angry when they're kept there. You can crawl naked on the floor, howl like a jackal, rage and bite. If anyone did this anywhere on the promenade people would be astonished, but there it's the most common or garden thing to do. There's a freedom there which not even Socialists have ever dreamed of.

  Jaroslav Hašek

  Garden, People, Naked

  Jaroslav Hašek (1993). “The Good Soldier Svejk”, Everyman's Library

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• The world is becoming like a lunatic asylum run by lunatics.

  David Lloyd George

  Running, Political, World

  In Observer 8 Jan. 1933

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• We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

  Robert McKee

  Communication, Thinking, Talking

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• If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.

  Romola Garai

  Keys, Hands, Actresses

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• No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Taken, Mean, Thinking

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• I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Stars, Believe, Men

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

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