Quotes by R. D. Laing

“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.”

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

“Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”

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

“To put meaning in ones life may end in madness,But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire--It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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.

Schizophrenic behaviour is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveller with his patient.

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

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 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.