R. D. Laing Quotations | Page 2

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

Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?

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

Before one goes through the gate one may not be aware there is a gate One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gate

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.

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

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.

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

True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.

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

If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.

Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

The way out is through the door you came in.

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

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

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.