Quotes About Madness

Those whom Power can neither govern nor kill, it taxes with madness.

What is certain is that it is sheer madness a century later, when the economy of consumption is absorbing the economy of production and the exploitation of labour power is being subsumed by the exploitation of everyday creativity.

Must the howling Demos devour everything gentle in the land, and reduce us all to the common level of the pot-house politician, and compel us to use his slang? Radicalism seemed to be now, just what it had been in the great French Revolution, a sort of mad-dog virus; every one who was inoculated with it, becoming rabid.

No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

Only the madman is absolutely sure.

He understood that it only took one lunatic and a torch to bring everything to ruin.

It is something only a few know in their lives. It is a vision of something so clear, so true, it can only be a madness. You see what life is worth, and you know what death means.

Thousands of men had died needlessly so that two madmen could betray a good king.

He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe.

Wahnsinn ist, wenn man nicht mehr die Nähte sehen kann, mit denen die Welt zusammengenäht ist.

Peccato che non avessero niente di più preciso da esporre, come ad esempio un cartello con la scritta : RALLENTARE! PAZZO IN CORSO.

Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them religious; otherwise, they are likely to be called mad, psychotic or delusional... Clearly there is sanity in numbers.

Do we trust the idea of love, no matter how mad – from Don Quixote's love for the farm girl he renames Dulcinea del Toboso to Yossarian's love for the chaplain – because in the face of conformity, the madder the love, in some mysterious way the greater the commitment to freedom?

Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There's this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn't quite sharp enough anymore, a waxing and waning fuzziness that might be what the edge of madness feels like.

Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There's this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn't quite sharp enough anymore, a waxing and waning fuzziness that might be what the edge of madness feels like. The

going sane feels just like going crazy.

La locura de mi alma no puede reclinarse, vive en lo inquieto, en lo desordenado, en el desequilibrio de las cosas dinámicas, en el silencio del libre pensador, que vive solo, en callado destierro. The madness of my soul cannot repose, it lives in the restlessness in the disorder in the imbalance of things dynamic, in the silence of the free thinker, who lives alone, in quiet exile. (From Mi Alma / My Soul)

Do you think too long a period of nightlessness," mused Sandra, "could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can?

Part of love is preparing for death... Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness... [People say] you'll come out of it... And you do come out of it, that's true. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.

The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words... Mad has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van.

His thoughts inhabit a different plane from those of ordinary men; the simplest interpretation of that is to call him crazy.

Je wahnsinninger alles um uns herum wird, desto normaler komme ich mir selbst vor. Mafiaboss mit achtzehn? Gestaltwandler? Verliebt in die eindeutig verrückteste Rosa der Welt? Alles ein Klacks gegen dieses Irrenhaus da draußen.