I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world. R.D. Laing

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.

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

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.

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

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. 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.

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.

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.

Pleasures of the Mind has launched a wonderful page dedicated to existentialism and Abraham H. Maslow, within The Realm of Existentialism section, that may be of interest.

Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brain-washing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.

We are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today.

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

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.

Playing the game of reality with no real cards in one's hand.

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.

Perhpas there's consolation in the sigh That cannot find the who or what to blame. Sonnet 13

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.

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 father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.

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.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

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.

Freud was a hero. He descended to the “Underworld” and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors to stone.

More and more concern about communication, less and less to communicate.

There is something I don’t know that I am supposed to know. I don’t know what it is I don’t know, and yet am supposed to know, And I feel I look stupid if I seem both not to know it and not know what it is I don’t know. Therefore, I pretend to know it. This is nerve-wracking since I don’t know what I must pretend to know. Therefore, I pretend to know everything - Knots

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 - Knots

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. 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

What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical 'mechanisms.' There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically 'normal' forms of alienation. The 'normally' alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the 'formal' majority as bad

Playing the game of reality with no real cards in one's hand

A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed

It is unfortunate that personal and subjective are words so abused as to have no power to convey any genuine act of seeing the other as person (if we mean this we have to revert to 'objective') but imply immediately that one is merging one's own feelings and attitudes into one's own feelings and attitudes into one's study of the other in such a way as to distort our perception of him. In contrast to the reputable 'objective' or 'scientific', we have the disreputable 'subjective', 'intuitive', or, worst of all, 'mystical.' It is interesting, for example, that one frequently encounters 'merely' before subjective, whereas it is almost inconceivable to speak of anyone being 'merely' objective

The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.