Quotes from R. D. Laing

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

If I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another.

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.

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.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

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.

Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

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.

What we think is less than what we know; What we know is less than what we love; What we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.

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

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

We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies.

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

Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.