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Alienation
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We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
-R. D. Laing
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Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
-R. D. Laing
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Baby, Babies
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From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.
-R. D. Laing
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Change
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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.
-R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience
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Children
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Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
-R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, Ch. 3
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Fellowship
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The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.
-R. D. Laing
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Humanity
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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.
-R. D. Laing
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Individuality
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The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.
-R. D. Laing, The Divided Self, 1969
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Love
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Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
-R. D. Laing
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Madness
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The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
-R. D. Laing
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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.
-R. D. Laing
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Mental Illness
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There is no such condition as schizophrenia, but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
-R. D. Laing
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Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
-R. D. Laing
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Modern, Modernism
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In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.
-R. D. Laing
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Ordinary
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Normality 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 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
-R. D. Laing
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Books by and about R. D. Laing