R. D. Laing

We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.

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.

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

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

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

Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.

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.

Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.

In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.

Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

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

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.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

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.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.

There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.

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 call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience...It is radically estranged from the structure of being.

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

Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.