We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
R. D. LaingRead
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
Interpretation
The quote warns against the self-destructive consequences of misinterpreting violence as a form of love.
R. D. Laing's quote highlights the paradox of how violence can be disguised as love, suggesting that such misguided expressions lead to self-destruction and harm both to individuals and society. It calls for an examination of the true nature of love and encourages a recognition of genuine compassion, rather than the toxic relationships that can arise when we confuse control or aggression with affection.
In practice
During a seminar on emotional intelligence, this quote could open up a discussion about healthy vs. unhealthy relationships.
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.
You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise. You must be proud of your enemy: then the success of your enemy shall be your success too.
He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.
I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.
I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind.
Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.
It [a new world order] needs only that the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Russia should get together in order to set up an effective control of currency, credit, production, and distribution – that is to say, an effective ‘dictatorship of prosperity,’ for the whole world. The other sixty odd States would have to join in or accommodate themselves to the over-ruling decisions of these major Powers.
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