Quotes from R. D. Laing

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

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate.

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

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 father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.

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

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

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

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.

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

To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.

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.

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

Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.

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.

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.

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

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.

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

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

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

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.

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

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.