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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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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
Also
Renewal
May
Existential
Wells
Liberation
Well
Madness
Need
Diversity
Needs
Potential
Break
Enslavement
Death
Breakdown

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
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In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.
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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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Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
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Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
R. D. Laing
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Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.
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If I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because 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
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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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In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
R. D. Laing