R. D. Laing Quotes

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

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

Where can you scream? It’s a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?

If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know. If I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know.

No one has the answer: we are answer and question.

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.

We are all murderers and prostitutes – no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

The way out is through the door you came in.

Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.

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

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.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

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

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.

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

If I do not know that I do not know, I think I know.
If I do not know that I know, I think I do not know.

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

Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.

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.