Quote

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

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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
Context
Madness
Equivocal
Present
Frames
Call
Normality
Freedom
Pervasive
Ambiguous
Reference
Sanity

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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.
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Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
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Few books today are forgivable.
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Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
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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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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.
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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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Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
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We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
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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.
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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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The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.
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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.
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Perhaps God is not dead perhaps God himself is mad.
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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.
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No one has the answer: we are answer and question.
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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.
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Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.
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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.
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I, for instance, regard any particular man as finite, as one who has had a beginning and who will have an end. He has been born, and he is going to die. In the meantime, he has a body that roots him to this time and this place.
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