R.D. Laing

"The human spirit cannot be broken by external forces alone."

"The act of loving is an act of self-abandonment."

"We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love."

"True sanity entails in some sense a ability to transcend, detach from, or alter the social consensus."

"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."

"Madness to be sane in a mad world is a form of madness."

"We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, ashamed of the lives we lead."

"The experience of oneself is always a particular case of the experience of another."

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

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

"The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances."

"Each person is a prisoner of his own experience."

"We live in a deeply irrational age when false facts are invented daily and what should be true is ignored."

"The greatest men in history have been nothing but servants."

"Our 'normal' science is itself a form of collective madness."

"To speak of 'mere ideology' is already to devalue the spoken word."

"We are dying creatures who do not want to die, who cannot bear to face our inevitable annihilation."

"The self that stands out nakedly without its system of defenses is exposed and vulnerable."

"To relate is to be in relationship to another in a way that honors their truth as well as your own."

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease."

"We are all murderers and prostitutes — no matter to whom we pray."

"The one person who has more illusions than anyone else is the healthy well-adjusted man."

"Grief is the price we pay for love."

"We are all essentially alone, and any attempt to deny this is delusion."

"The human world is in terrible trouble because people cannot see each other."

"Experience itself has to be decontaminated of the projections that have been placed upon it."

"Our alienation goes to the roots of our being."

"I have never been admitted to a university as a student, yet I have been a university teacher."

"There is little we can do with the best of goodwill in the world if we cannot imagine things being better."

"The family is the place where we learn our first lessons in power."