Quotes About Madness

Yes I am a little bit crazy. But the rest of the human race is mad.

It would be madness to let the purposes or the methods of private enterprise set the habits of the age of atomic energy.

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.

Dr. Henry Cotton, a figure straight out of a horror movie.

By contrast, Andrew Kehoe's appalling deed—an unholy blend of school massacre, terrorist bombing, and suicide attack—was seen not as a symptom of societal breakdown but as a sheer aberration, the singular act of a midwestern madman. As such, it provided the public with a brief frisson of horror before being relegated to obscurity. Decades would pass before its true relevance became clear, as a precursor of our own era's worst nightmares.

As psychiatrist Donald Lunde puts it in his classic book Murder and Madness, the purpose of an insanity trial is to "separate the mad from the bad." American juries, however, as Lunde also points out, are often reluctant "to believe that someone who kills is mad rather than bad. In fact, many people suspect that the insanity defense is a ruse employed by clever lawyers in collaboration with naive psychiatrists to win an acquittal of an obviously guilty client.

everybody he knew was going quietly mad from being tied on a leash that was too short.

I stamp out vast empires. I crush palaces in my rigid hands. I harden my heart against churches. I blot out cemetaries. I feed the people with stinging nettles. I resurrect madness. I thrust my naked sword between the ribs of the world. I murder the world!

In een paroxysme van kleuren ging de hemel zich inmiddels te buiten aan een zonsondergang, zoals die in Europa alleen door een krankzinnige belichtingstechnicus verzonnen kon worden, waarop onmiddelijk ontslag zou volgen

The place where optimism flourishes most is in the lunatic asylum.

The place where optimism flourishes the most is the lunatic asylum.

Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on the pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

the place where optism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

He's around the twist,' said Azalea. 'Breaking all the windows? He's mad.' 'Ah, no,' said the King. 'It's only madness if you actually do it. If you want to break all the windows in the house and drown yourself in a bucket but don't actually do it, well, that's love.

Eccentricty had flowered into madness.

but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.

Thomas Szasz, writing in The Manufacture of Madness, points out that this "human tendency to embrace collective error—especially error that threatens harm and commands specific protective action—seems to be an integral part of man's social nature.

If we lose our sanity ... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.

Maybe it's an insanity test, Haggis thought—if you believe it, you're automatically kicked out. He considered that possibility. But when he read it again, he decided, "This is madness.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

This is a crazy world, Margo. Maybe you need t o be a little crazy to see it.

It was my biggest fear to go crazy like my mom. I worried about waking up one day and no longer understanding reality in quite the same way, being lost in the black hole of madness.