Quotes about madness

If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being, the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived “enemies” – his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals.

Science and technology have magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the human mind has upon the planet, other lifeforms, and upon humans themselves... the history of the twentieth century is where that dysfunction, that collective insanity, can be most clearly recognized.

By the year 1914... the highly intelligent human mind had invented not only the internal combustion engine, but also bombs, machine guns, submarines, flame throwers, and poison gas. Intelligence in the service of madness!

The human mind is highly intelligent. Yet its very intelligence is tainted by madness.

To recognize one’s own insanity, is of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.

The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.

The world’s gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it.

The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it.

There's only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.

Lunatics are writers whose works write them.

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.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

The sane man is simply a better liar than an insane man.