Top 100 R.D. Laing Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “The human mind has to ask “Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?” And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.”

— R.D. Laing

52. “The group, whether We or You or Them, is not a new individual or organism or hyperorganism on the social scene; it has no agency of its own, it has no consciousness of its own. Yet we may shed our own blood and the blood of others for this bloodless presence.”

— R.D. Laing

53. “Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.”

— R.D. Laing

54. “The square root of nothing.”

— R.D. Laing

55. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

56. “Our ‘normal’ ‘adjusted’ state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.”

— R.D. Laing

57. “The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we’ll be shaking tomorrow.”

— R.D. Laing

58. “There is no such condition as ‘schizophrenia,’ but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.”

— R.D. Laing

59. “Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.”

— R.D. Laing

60. “Any experience of reality is indescribable!”

— R.D. Laing

61. “Few books today are forgivable.”

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

63. “Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”

— R.D. Laing

64. “Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.”

— R.D. Laing

65. “We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.”

— R.D. Laing

66. “A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.”

— R.D. Laing

67. “The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.”

— R.D. Laing

68. “We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which ‘our’ world will die with us although ‘the’ world will go on without us.”

— R.D. Laing

69. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

70. “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.”

— R.D. Laing

71. “Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.”

— R.D. Laing

72. “How dare you have fun when Christ died on the cross for you! Was he having fun?”

— R.D. Laing

73. “A lot of the time I’m in the present, and I’m thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment.”

— R.D. Laing

74. “Jack falls in love with Jill’s image of Jack, taking it to be himself.”

— R.D. Laing

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

— R.D. Laing

76. “Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.”

— R.D. Laing

77. “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.”

— R.D. Laing

78. “This writing is not exempt. It remains like all writing an absurd and revolting effort to make an impression on a world that will remain as unmoved as it is avid. If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you, I would let you know.”

— R.D. Laing

79. “Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing “the facts”. We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the “evidence”.”

— R.D. Laing

80. “You don’t love me... Believe me! You don’t love anyone. How could you? And no one loves you. How could they? Except me, it’s only because I love you that I’m telling you all this. I Love you... R. D. Laing.”

— R.D. Laing

81. “What do you do when you don’t know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession.”

— R.D. Laing

82. “No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not “got” schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.”

— R.D. Laing

83. “There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.”

— R.D. Laing

84. “I’m ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I’m not.”

— R.D. Laing

85. “The reason I suggest that one speaks of a false-self system is that the ‘personality’, false self, mask, ‘front’, or persona that such individuals wear may consist in an amalgam of various part-selves, none of which is so fully developed as to have a comprehensive ‘personality’ of its own.”

— R.D. Laing

86. “The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.”

— R.D. Laing

87. “In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.”

— R.D. Laing

88. “What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.”

— R.D. Laing

89. “It seems also that the preferred method of attack on the other is based on the same principle as the attack felt to be implicit in the other’s relationship to oneself. Thus, the man who is frightened of his own subjectivity being swamped, impinged upon, or congealed by the other is frequently to be found attempting to swamp, to impinge upon, or to kill the other person’s subjectivity.”

— R.D. Laing

90. “A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is ‘depersonalized’ in psychiatric jargon.”

— R.D. Laing

91. “I, for instance, regard any particular man as finite, as one who has had a beginning and who will have an end. He has been born, and he is going to die. In the meantime, he has a body that roots him to this time and this place.”

— R.D. Laing

92. “The scientific method is based on tampering with what would be happening if we were doing nothing to it.”

— R.D. Laing

93. “Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.”

— R.D. Laing

94. “One cannot say everything at once.”

— R.D. Laing

95. “In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.”

— R.D. Laing

96. “Life is a sexually transmitted disease.”

— R.D. Laing

97. “In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.”

— R.D. Laing

98. “Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.”

— R.D. Laing

99. “The dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families in other places and times.”

— R.D. Laing

100. “The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. 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 who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defense.”

— R.D. Laing