“These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.”
Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 58
Context: Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing 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.
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 mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.
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Ronald David Laing 30
Scottish psychiatrist and author 1927–1989Related quotes
Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 14.
As quoted in Profile of Sir Alfred Ayer (June 1971) by Euro-Television, quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999), p. 2.
Source: Into the Wild (1996), Ch. 14.
Context: Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn't the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive.
Source: Black Studies: Bringing Back The Person (1969), p. 49
“Systems theory, in its concern for the whole and its emergent properties, ignores the components.”
Source: Society: A Complex Adaptive System--Essays in Social Theory, (1998), p. 183 as cited in: Kenneth D. Bailey (2006).
Source: Intuitions and Summaries of Thought (1862), Volume I, p. 83.
Source: The Conquest of Bread (1892), Ch. 5 : Food, p. 99
Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), VI. Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries, p. 52
As quoted in Hitler and I, Otto Strasser, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company (1940) pp. 113-114
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