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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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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
Justice
Range
Knowledge
Deeds
Change
Management
Littles
Fail
Little
Shapes
Think
Failing
Thinking
Thoughts
Notice
Learning
Limited

More quotes by 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.
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Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.
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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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No one has the answer: we are answer and question.
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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.
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.
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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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Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
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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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Perhaps God is not dead perhaps God himself is mad.
R. D. Laing
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Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.
R. D. Laing
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The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.
R. D. Laing
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A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and drugs them asleep again (increasingly effectively as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), helps to drive them crazy.
R. D. Laing
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Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
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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Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.
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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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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One cannot say everything at once.
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.
R. D. Laing