“When men tell us that the great religious teachers are neuropaths, that Buddha, Christ, S. Francis, are neuropaths, then we are inclined to cast our lot with the abnormal few, rather than with the normal many. We know what they were. They were men who saw far more and knew far more than we; what matters it whether we call their brains normal or abnormal? In these men's consciousness is a ray of the Divine splendour; as Browning says: Through such souls alone God, stooping, shows sufficient of Hill Light For us in the dark to rise by. And if in those cases the brain change from a normal to an abnormal state, then humanity must ever remain thankful to abnormality. That was the first answer which may be made to this statement of Lombroso, and you find a man like Dr. Maudsley, the famous doctor, asking whether there is any law that nature shall use only for her purposes what we call the perfect brains? May it not be that for her higher performances she needs brains which are different from the ordinary, the normal brains of man?”

“…we are willing to admit the normality of the abnormal—are willing to admit that we never understood the normal better than when it has been allowed to reach its full growth and become the abnormal.”

“Here appears a child plainly not normal, what shall we do with him? Shall we, as some have advocated, even from Spartan days, hold that the weaklings should be destroyed? No. In cultivating plant life, while we destroy much that is unfit, we are constantly on the lookout for what has been called the abnormal, that which springs apart in new lines. How many plants are there in the world to-day that were not in one sense once abnormalities? No; it is the influence of cultivation, of selection, of surroundings, of environment, that makes the change from the abnormal to the normal. From the children we are led to call abnormal, may come, under wise cultivation and training, splendid normal natures.”

“There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains.”

“In our study of psychopathology, we began as sadists trying to produce abnormality. Today, we are psychiatrists trying to achieve normality and equanimity.”

“tt>/* we have tried to make this normal case as abnormal as possible */</tt”

“Such people who choose to depress are not mentally ill; their brain chemistry is not abnormal. It is changed from what it is when they are happy, but that change is perfectly normal for the total behavior, depressing, they are choosing…. The brain chemistry no more causes his depressing than sweating causes running. It is the choice to depress or to run that results in both.”

“I shall argue that to seem to speak well of the gods to men is far easier than to speak well of men to men: for the inexperience and utter ignorance of his hearers about any subject is a great assistance to him who has to speak of it, and we know how ignorant we are concerning the gods.”

“Listen ladies, we were not born to be a man's play thing. We were not born to serve men... We are not less than or inferior to men. We are life. We give life. We nurture life. I don't understand how that's not a big deal but it should be a big deal. It's a great deal actually. We endure a hell of a lot of pain to keep the cycle of life going. Being treated less than essential, less than precious should not be tolerated. In fact, I don't even understand how it's allowed and normalized.”

“At length a force of three million S. A. men was pushing on behind him [Röhm], and God knew whither they were pushing. There were large numbers of Communists and Social Democrats among them; many of the storm troopers were called ‘beefsteaks—brown and red within. Jest were retailed such as the following: one S. A. man says to another: ‘In our storm troop there are three Nazis, but we shall soon have spewed them out.”