Top 100 R.D. Laing Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

2. “Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.”

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

6. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

7. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

8. “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.”

— R.D. Laing

9. “Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”

— R.D. Laing

10. “We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.”

— R.D. Laing

11. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

12. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

13. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

15. “Where can you scream? It’s a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?”

— R.D. Laing

16. “If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one’s suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one’s suffering is based on sheer lies.”

— R.D. Laing

17. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

18. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

19. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

20. “I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.”

— R.D. Laing

21. “What we think is less than what we know; What we know is less than what we love; What we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.”

— R.D. Laing

22. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

25. “If I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another.”

— R.D. Laing

26. “Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.”

— R.D. Laing

27. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

29. “No one acts or experiences in a vacuum...”

— R.D. Laing

30. “Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.”

— R.D. Laing

31. “The way out is through the door you came in.”

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

33. “Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.”

— R.D. Laing

34. “The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.”

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

36. “Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.”

— R.D. Laing

37. “When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.”

— R.D. Laing

38. “In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.”

— R.D. Laing

39. “We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.”

— R.D. Laing

40. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

41. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

42. “What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism – can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?”

— R.D. Laing

43. “I am quite sure that a good number of “cures” of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to play at being sane.”

— R.D. Laing

44. “No one has the answer: we are answer and question.”

— R.D. Laing

45. “To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.”

— R.D. Laing

46. “Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.”

— R.D. Laing

47. “A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from ‘reality’ than many of the people on whom the label ‘psychotic’ is fixed.”

— R.D. Laing

48. “Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.”

— R.D. Laing

49. “Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.”

— R.D. Laing

50. “Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.”

— R.D. Laing