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Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

R. D. Laing

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R. D. Laing
Age: 61 †
Born: 1927
Born: October 7
Died: 1989
Died: August 23
Author
Existential Therapist
Military Personnel
Military Physician
Non-Fiction Writer
Physician Writer
Psychiatrist
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Glasgow
Scotland
Ronald Laing
R.D. Laing
Ronald D. Laing
Ronald David Laing
Madness
Rationale
Rational
Bipolar
Crazy
Psychiatrist
World
Adjustment
Insanity
Depression
Perfectly
Insane

More quotes by R. D. Laing

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The human mind has to ask Who, what, whence, whither, why am I? And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.
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Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.
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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
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True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.
R. D. Laing
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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
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True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
R. D. Laing
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I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
R. D. Laing
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What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism -- can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?
R. D. Laing
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If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.
R. D. Laing
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Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
R. D. Laing
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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
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The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R. D. Laing
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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
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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
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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
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When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
R. D. Laing
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Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
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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
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Perhaps God is not dead perhaps God himself is mad.
R. D. Laing
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Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
R. D. Laing