R. D. Laing Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all R. D. Laing Quotes
We are born into a world where alienation awaits us.

R. D. Laing
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

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

R. D. Laing
We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.

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

R. D. Laing
A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.

R. D. Laing
Life, you see, is a sexually transmitted disease and there's a 100 per cent mortality rate.

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

R. D. Laing
If I don't know I don't know
I think I know
If I don't know I know
I think I don't know

R. D. Laing
In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.

R. D. Laing
No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.

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

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

R. D. Laing
Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.

R. D. Laing
There is no such "condition" as "schizophrenia," but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

R. D. Laing
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

R. D. Laing
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
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
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.

R. D. Laing
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
Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.

R. D. Laing
Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

R. D. Laing
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
I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not.
You must
be laughing at me
for feeling you are laughing at me
if you are not laughing at me.

R. D. Laing
The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

R. D. Laing
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

R. D. Laing
The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data.

R. D. Laing
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
We cannot help but see the person in one way or other and place our constructions or interpretations on "his" behaviour, as soon as we are in a relationship with him.

R. D. Laing
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.

R. D. Laing