R. D. Laing

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.

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.

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

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.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.

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.

Children do not give up their innate imagination curiosity dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.

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.

Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

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

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know I know, I think I don't know.

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.

Insanity a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.

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.

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

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.

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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