Quotes by R.D. Laing

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

“Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is...”

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

“The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is...”

“Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external worldthe interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities.As this external human world is almost completel...”

“You don't love me.. Believe me! You don't love anyone. How could you? And no one loves you. How could they? Except me, it's only because I love you that I'm telling you all this. I Love you.. R. D....”

“The anti-psychiatrists held various, sometimes conflicting views but one particular line of reasoning is attributable to all of themthey all pitched their arguments against the power of the psychia...”

“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”

“We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.”

“Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that ...”

“If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.”

“Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”

“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.”

“Under the heading of "defense mechanisms, psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introje...”

“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game”

“Under the heading of "defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introj...”