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No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.
-Aristotle
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And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.
-Antonin Artaud
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In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!
-J. G. Ballard
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I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
-Charles Baudelaire
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The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason.
-Hermann Broch
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One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.
-Edward Dahlberg
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The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.
-Salvador Dali
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In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
-Don Delillo
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Much Madness is divinest Sense -- to a discerning Eye -- much Sense -- the starkest Madness --
-Emily Dickinson
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Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?
-Isadora Duncan
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Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
-Michel Foucault
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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.
-Allen Ginsberg
Howl
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But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!.
-Jack Kerouac
On The Road, 1957
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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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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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We're not in Wonderland anymore Alice.
-Charles Manson
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The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.
-Herman Melville
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Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
-Henry Miller
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Madness is something rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
-Cynthia Ozick
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I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
-Ezra Pound
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It's a question to ask ourselves if we're not mad. But who are the madmen, in God's name? Those who wonder about it, or the others? If we ever began to speak out loud, what would they do with us, tell me?
-Victor Serge
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O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad.
-William Shakespeare
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We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
-George Bernard Shaw
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Books about Madness
