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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
Depression
Perfectly
Insane
Madness
Rationale
Rational
Bipolar
Crazy
Psychiatrist
World
Adjustment
Insanity

More quotes by R. D. Laing

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Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
R. D. Laing
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No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not got schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.
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Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.
R. D. Laing
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To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.
R. D. Laing
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The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.
R. D. Laing
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Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.
R. D. Laing
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Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
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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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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From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not true sanity. Their madness is not true madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.
R. D. Laing
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Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
R. D. Laing
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Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.
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 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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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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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.
R. D. Laing
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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.
R. D. Laing
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There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
R. D. Laing
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What we think is less than what we know What we know is less than what we love What we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.
R. D. Laing
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Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.
R. D. Laing