Quotes from Ronald David Laing

Normality 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 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

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

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.

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.

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

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