R. D. Laing Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Madness, Sanity, Ambiguous

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

  R. D. Laing

  Reason, Obedient

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

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Men, Normal

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• 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

  Doctors, Medicine, Differences

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• Any experience of reality is indescribable!

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, Indescribable

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• To mystify, in the active sense, is to befuddle, cloud, obscure, mask whatever is going on, whether this be experience, action, or process, or whatever is "the issue." It induces confusion in the sense that there is failure to see what is "really" being experienced, or being done, or going on, and failure to distinguish or discriminate the actual issues. This entails the substitution of false for true constructions of what is being experienced, being done (praxis), or going on (process), and the substitution of false issues for the actual issues.

  R. D. Laing

  Clouds, Issues, Confusion

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• 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

  Pain, Bipolar, Trying

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

  R. D. Laing

  Philosophy, Doe, Abstraction

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• 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

  Yesterday, Intellectual, Machines

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• 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

  Beauty, Lying, Reality

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• 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 affixed

  R. D. Laing

  Reality, People, Labels

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

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Parent, Relation

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.61, Penguin UK

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• Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

  R. D. Laing

  Thinking, Smell, Self

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.19, Penguin UK

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• 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

  Inspirational, Creativity, People

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• 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.

  R. D. Laing

  Break Through, Diversity, May

  Politics of Experience (1967) ch. 6

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• 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

  Play, Numbers, Insanity

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• A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.

  R. D. Laing

  May, Psychiatrist, Healer

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• 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

  Spiritual, Loneliness, Anxiety

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• The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.

  R. D. Laing

  Honesty, Ethics, Absolution

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• In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.

  R. D. Laing

  Simple, Self, World

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• Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Imbeciles, Fool

  "The Politics of Experience". Book by Ronald David Laing, p. 58, 1967.

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• Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.

  R. D. Laing

  Veils, Truth Is, Secrecy

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• When I go beyond a certain range it's outside of my direct horizon therefore I've got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people that I know.... I've got to try to piece together some tentative information picture of what the whole thing is like, but I'm aware that it becomes more and more speculative as it becomes more and more second, third, fourth hand. And this applies to absolutely everyone.

  R. D. Laing

  Communication, Writing, Hands

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• Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.

  R. D. Laing

  Depression, Mad, Religion

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

  R. D. Laing

  Mad, Horizon, Steps

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