R. D. Laing Quotes
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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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Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
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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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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
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Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
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We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
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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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Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
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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.
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There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
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Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
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We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
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Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
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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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We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
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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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Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.
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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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Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.
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If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.
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In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.
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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.
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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.
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Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.