R.D. Laing

"If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you something to make you smile."

"The divided self is a fact of life for those who are broken by society."

"Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived."

"Our task is to wake up. We are the only species that can."

"Madness is to be understood only as a sane response to an insane world."

"True sanity entails in some way a degree of madness."

"We teach people to repress themselves from infancy."

"The price of maintaining myths is the corruption of the mind."

"Drugs are a symptom of society's spiritual bankruptcy."

"The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you."

"Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites."

"Experience suggests that the only way of change is through relationship."

"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."

"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out."

"There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors of perception."

"We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves."

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

"The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings can change the outer aspects of their lives by changing their inner attitudes."

"What we call normal is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience."

"Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that."

"The inner world is as real as the outer world."

"We are dying. We are not well. Our greatest anguish comes from our inauthentic living."

"The self is not autonomous but is constructed within relationship."

"To know and not to act is not to know."

"Every man has jails. When you enter them, you find they are empty."

"The conflict and the pain, you emerge from it all very much the same person you went in."

"Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair."

"Our capacity to destroy one another is very real. Our capacity to forge authentic love is equally real."

"The world is divided into those who believe in the authenticity of human relationships and those who do not."

"No one can be fully himself while living in a society that denies his reality."