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 there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

— Ronald David Laing

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.

— Ronald David Laing

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

— Ronald David Laing

Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of others' experience. It is concerned with the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is, with inter-experience. It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it, and your and my behaviour as you experience it.

— 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

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

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

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

— Ronald David Laing

I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not.        if you are not laughing at me.

— Ronald David Laing

If I don't know I don't know        I think I don't know

— Ronald David Laing