R.D. Laing > Quotes

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”
― R.D. Laing

“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.”
― Ronald D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.”
― R.D. Laing

“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

“Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
― R.D. Laing

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”
― R.D. Laing

“In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
― R. D. Laing

“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game”
― R.D. Laing, Knots

“Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.”
― R.D. Laing

“We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.”
― R.D. Laing

“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”
― R.D. Laing

“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

“Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“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

“We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.”
― R.D. Laing

“The Lotus opens. Movement from earth, through water, from fire to air. Out and in beyond life and death now, beyond inner and outer, sense and non-sense, meaning and futility, male and female, being and non-being, Light and darkness, void and full. Beyond all duality, or non-duality, beyond and beyond. Disincarnation. I breathe again.”
― R.D. Laing, Politics Of Experience

“Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.”
― R.D. Laing

“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

“Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.”
― R. D. Laing

“The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself 'together with' others or 'at home in' the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil. ”
― R.D. Laing

“A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. 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 fixed.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“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, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does
not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is
preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc.
(imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly
expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible. Whatever
failures or successes come the way of the false-self system, the self
is able to remain uncommitted and undefined. In phantasy, the
self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is
thus omnipotent and completely free - but only in phantasy. Once it
commits itself to any real project it suffers the agonies of humiliation
- not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to
subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and
free only in phantasy. The more this phantastic omnipotence and
freedom are indulged, the more weak, helpless, and fettered it
becomes in actuality. The illusion of omnipotence and freedom
can be sustained only within the magic circle of its own shut-upness
in phantasy. And in order that this attitude be not dissipated
by the slightest intrusion of reality, phantasy and reality have to
be kept apart.”
― R.D. Laing

“What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise