Talk:Ronald David Laing

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• There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
• Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

An online source cites 29 minutes into a video -- Laing, R.D. (1988), Did You Used to be RD Laing? (Vancouver:Third Mind Productions, 1988)

• Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
• Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
• 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.
• 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.
• Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
• The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation
• We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
• 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.
• Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.
• Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
• 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.

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