Awaken The World Through Enlightened Media

Quotes by R. D. Laing

August 1, 2022
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“We can see other people”s behaviour, but not their experience.”
“Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.”
“Many of us do not know, or even believe, that every night we enter zones of reality in which we forget our waking life as regularly as we forget our dreams when we awake.”
“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.”
“Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”
“Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.”
“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 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. ”
“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.”
“I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you. And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so on.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.”
“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.”
“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
“Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”
“From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.”
“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.”
“The stars as I perceive them are no more or less in my brain than the stars as I imagine them. I do not imagine them to be in my head, any more than I see them in my head.”