Madness

(137 votes)   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
1864-1929, American Sociologist

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(136 votes)   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
1896-1948, French Theater Producer, Actor, Theorist

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(134 votes)   In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

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(105 votes)   The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

Cynthia Ozick
1928-, American Novelist, short-story Writer

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(104 votes)   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
1927-1989, British Psychiatrist

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(99 votes)   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
1821-1867, French Poet

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(91 votes)   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
1927-1989, British Psychiatrist

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(89 votes)   We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950, Irish-born British Dramatist

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(80 votes)   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
1926-, American Author

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(76 votes)   Much Madness is divinest Sense -- to a discerning Eye -- much Sense -- the starkest Madness --

Emily Dickinson
1830-1886, American Poet

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(75 votes)   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
1819-1891, American Author

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(65 votes)   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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