L quotes

View Quote A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university … This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.

View Quote R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience.

View Quote For many years he has not breathed the air,The wholesome open air ; the sun, the moon,The stars, the clouds, the fair blue heaven, the spring,The flowers, the trees, and the sweet face of man,Song, or words yet more musical than song,Affections, feelings, social intercourse(Unless remembered in his fairy dreams)Have all been strangers to his solitude ! —A curse is set on him, like poverty,Or leprosy, or the red plague, but worse, —The heart has sent its fire up to the brain,And he is mad.

View Quote Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The London Literary Gazette (5th April 1823), POETICAL CATALOGUE OF PICTURES. - 'A Maniac visited by his Family in confinement : by Davis.'

View Quote You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior.

View Quote Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 10

View Quote It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history — free culture. If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.

View Quote Lawrence Lessig, in Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004) - Full text online

View Quote There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

View Quote Oscar Levant, as quoted in Celebrity Register : An Irreverent Compendium of American Quotable Notables (1959) by Cleveland Amory ; also paraphrased as "There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line".

View Quote It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre 'kick', Here is the material for a really profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination....The very pre-ponderance of passionately pious men in the colony was virtually an assurance of unnatural crime; insomuch as psychology now proves the religious instinct to be a form of transmuted eroticism precisely parallel to the transmutations in other directions which respectively produce such things as sadism, hallucination, melancholia, and other mental morbidities. Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity. This was aggravated, of course, by the Puritan policy of rigorously suppressing all the natural outlets of excuberant feeling--music, laughter, colour, pageantry, and so on. To observe Christmas Day was once a prison offence....

View Quote H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Robert E. Howard, (October 4, 1930), [1]

View Quote The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

View Quote H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)