Madhouses Quotes - Page 2

The world is a collective madhouse, its inhabitants are merely faking sanity. It is critical to becoming aware of these aberrations, for pretensions can be the enemy of love.

John Astin

Enemy, Becoming, Aberration

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[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.

Kate Millett

Jail, Mind, Steps

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Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

Anton Chekhov

Escaping, Useless, Prison

Anton Chekhov (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated)”, p.2939, Delphi Classics

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Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.

Oliver Heaviside

Knowledge, Science, Essence

Electromagnetic Theory Chapter I, Introduction (p. 12)

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Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life, Math, Looks

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When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.

John Cleese

People, Age, World

"The Secret Life of Brian". TV Movie, January 1, 2007.

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Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last

Gregory Maguire

Small Steps, Lasts, Stills

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As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.

Charles Bukowski

Jail, Goes On, Forget

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One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.

Michael Ende

Children, Doors, Numbers

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Madhouses are houses made on purpose to cause suffering . . . I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures.

Camille Claudel

House, Suffering, Purpose

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At the moment, every country arrives at climate negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible. This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide. We dont want a global suicide pact. We want a global survival pact

Mohamed Nasheed

Suicide, Country, Survival

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Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and the police.

August Strindberg

Police, Society, Wardens

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Dark City Blue is a freight train of a thriller crashing through some madhouse city night while a bomb's ticking down to zero. It's the cage fighting equivalent of a police procedural: violent, gaudy, and packing heat.

Trent Jamieson

Zero, Fighting, Dark

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When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.

Thomas Szasz

Jesus, Men, People

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Performers always come back from the Edinburgh festival with adventure stories. Watts told a few: meeting a young kilt maker who spent a year in a madhouse after eating too much LSD, and accompanying Seattle actor and musician Michael McQuilken (of Collaborator Productions) to the hospital after a Frisbee accident. He reached up to catch it and cut his hand on a sign, .. He had to get a few stitches, but I think he can still play.

Reggie Watts

Adventure, Cutting, Thinking

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It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies... not the death of his love but the shoelace that snaps with no time left.

Charles Bukowski

Men, Tragedy, His Love

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...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

Saul Bellow

Struggle, Sleep, Fighting

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The worst men have the best jobs
the best men have the worst jobs or are
unemployed or locked in
madhouses.

Charles Bukowski

Jobs, Men, Best Job

Charles Bukowski (2012). “The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993”, p.373, Canongate Books

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I sit here drunk now. I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here without committing murder or being murdered; without having ended up in the madhouse. as I drink alone again tonight my soul despite all the past agony thanks all the gods who were not there for me then.

Charles Bukowski

Past, Agony, Drunk

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We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness Into bars where people no longer speak to each other Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings Born into this Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

Charles Bukowski

Country, War, Hero

Charles Bukowski (2012). “The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993”, p.475, Canongate Books

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England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.

Leon Trotsky

Lasts, England, Revolutionary

Leon Trotsky (1974). “Collected Writings and Speeches on Britain”

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alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills.

Charles Bukowski

Wall, Fate, Men

Charles Bukowski, “Alone With Everybody”

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Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Keys, Bangs, Enough

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The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited.

Charles Bukowski

Jobs, Men, Doctors

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And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)

Jack Kerouac

Garden, Thinking, Nuts

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