Ronald David Laing

“Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”

“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.”

“The cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people.”

“Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.”

“Insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.”

“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.”

“The family's function is to repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut off transcendence; to believe in God, not to experience the Void.”

“We are born into a world where alienation awaits us.”

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.”

“From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not true sanity.”

“A child born today in the UK stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university.”