Ronald David Laing quotes

Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist, famous for his unconventional views on mental illness. His work focused on the social and interpersonal factors influencing mental health, often challenging mainstream psychiatric practices. He became an influential figure in the anti-psychiatry movement and inspired debates about the nature of sanity and society. Here are 48 of his quotes:

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

Ronald David Laing

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.

Ronald David Laing

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

Ronald David Laing

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

Ronald David Laing

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

Ronald David Laing

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

Ronald David Laing

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.

Ronald David Laing

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.

Ronald David Laing

Before one goes through the gate one may not be aware there is a gate One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gate.

Ronald David Laing

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

Ronald David Laing

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

Ronald David Laing

I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not. You must be laughing at me for feeling you are laughing at me if you are not laughing at me.

Ronald David Laing

It is of fundamental importance not to make the positivist mistake of assuming that because a group's members are in formation this means that they're necessarily on course.

Ronald David Laing

We cannot help but see the person in one way or other and place our constructions or interpretations on "his" behaviour, as soon as we are in a relationship with him.

Ronald David Laing

Few books today are forgivable.

Ronald David Laing

What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism - can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?

Ronald David Laing

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.

Ronald David Laing

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

Ronald David Laing

Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.

Ronald David Laing

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

Ronald David Laing

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

Ronald David Laing

I am doing it the it I am doing is the I that is doing it the I that is doing it is the it I am doing it is doing the I that am doing it I am being done by the it I am doing it is doing it.

Ronald David Laing