109 Quotes by R.D. Laing

Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.

No one acts or experiences in a vacuum...

From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not “true” sanity. Their madness is not “true” madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.

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.

Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.

Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.

Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.