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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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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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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We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
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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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There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
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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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Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
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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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We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university … This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
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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.