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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Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.
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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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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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Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
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We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today.
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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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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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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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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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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.