Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.

— R.D. Laing

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.

— R.D. Laing

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

— R.D. 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.

— R.D. Laing

Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

— R.D. Laing

Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.

— R.D. Laing

Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world—the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities. As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already has grave

— R.D. Laing

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

— R.D. Laing

The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself 'together with' others or 'at home in' the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.

— R.D. Laing

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game

— R.D. Laing