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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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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
Living
Bitter
Song
Capitalism
Often
Defeat
Around
Sing
Stills
Songs
Heartland
Still
Alive
Disillusion
Done
Within
Decay
Half
Reflect

More quotes by R. D. Laing

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Few books today are forgivable.
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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.
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.
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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I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
R. D. Laing
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We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
R. D. Laing
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Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
R. D. Laing
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Perhaps God is not dead perhaps God himself is mad.
R. D. Laing
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The dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families in other places and times.
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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One cannot say everything at once.
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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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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There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.
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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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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A lot of the time I'm in the present, and I'm thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment.
R. D. Laing
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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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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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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.
R. D. Laing