Quotes About Madness

A loucura é um país onde não entra quem quer. Tudo se conquista. Em todo o caso, ele, ele entrara como um senhor, soltando as amarras e as âncoras com o brio de um capitão que afunda o navio a pique, sozinho na proa.

But then, he calls many things mad that he does not care for. Perhaps that is easier than accepting them.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

Those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.

In southern and central Africa, tragedy roared at us, and we roared back. We shared dramas publicly, bled them on the corridors of hospitals, laid our corpses on the beds of neighbors, held our sorrows up in full light. We were volume ten about our madness and disorder, even if we were also resilient and enduring and tough.

A mad person isn't someone who sees what isn't there; he's someone who sees what is there but that others can't see. I really believe that.

I'm beginning to think that you should only be allowed to serve two terms, before madness sets in.

Madness isn't altogether a bad thing in comedy.

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice. DONALD BARTHELME, THE DEAD FATHER

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice. DONALD BARTHELME

Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we're becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren't as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren't as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we're not as mad as they are.

Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.

sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.

I saw at least one analysis of the experiment where the author seemed to find it perfectly plausible that if a person was overcome by a violent madness he'd involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.

I thought about my own over-anxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality?

the madness business is filled with people like Tony, reduced to their maddest edges.

madness that didn't involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it 'manie sans delire' – insanity without delusions.

society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

It turns out that the concept of group madness was the creation of a nineteenth-century French doctor called Gustave Le Bon. His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behaviour in a crowd. Our free will evaporates. A contagious madness takes over, a complete lack of restraint. We can't stop ourselves.

I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

they saw how well behaved I was, and decided it meant I could only behave well in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad." I

if a person was overcome by a violent madness he'd involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.