Quotes about madness
page 12

Leonid Brezhnev photo

“It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in Indefensible Weapons : The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (1992) by Robert Jay Lifton and Richard A. Falk, p. 224

Margaret Atwood photo
Ezra Pound photo
Clarence Thomas photo
Henri Matisse photo

“The vertical is in my spirit. It helps me to define precisely the direction of lines, and in quick sketches I never indicate a curve, that of a branch in landscape for example, without being aware of its relationship to the vertical.
My curves are not mad.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

La verticale est dans mon esprit. Elle m'aide à préciser la direction des lignes, et dans mes dessins rapides je n'indique pas une courbe, par exemple, celle d'une branche dans un paysage, sans avoir conscience de son rapport avec la verticale.
Mes courbes ne sont pas folles.
1940s, Jazz (1947)

Patrick McGoohan photo

“Mel [Gibson] will always be Mad Max, and me, I will always be a number.”

Patrick McGoohan (1928–2009) actor

Of his role in The Prisoner
Daily Mail, 15th January 2009 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1116243/How-star-stage-Patrick-McGoohan-Prisoner-success-switching-screen.html

Michael Collins (Irish leader) photo
Robert Fulghum photo
Cesare Pavese photo
Giambattista Vico photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Camille Paglia photo
Camille Paglia photo

“Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 16

Matthew Lewis (writer) photo

“Hark! hark! – What mean those yells – those cries?
His chain some furious madman breaks!
He comes! I see his glaring eyes!
Now! now! my dungeon bars he shakes.
Help! Help! He's gone! Oh! fearful woe,
Such screams to hear – such sights to see!
My brain! my brain!”

Matthew Lewis (writer) (1775–1818) English novelist and dramatist

I know, I know
I am not mad, but soon shall be.
"The Captive"; cited from The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis (London: Henry Colburn, 1839) vol. 1, pp. 239-40.

Gene Wolfe photo

“He is not mad. He is only more clever than you. It is not the same.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Volume 4, Ch. 10
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)

Simone Bittencourt de Oliveira photo
Babe Ruth photo

“They can boo and hoot me all they want. That doesn't matter to me. But when a fan calls insulting names from the grandstand and becomes abusive I don't intend to stand for it. This fellow today, whoever he was, called me a low-down bum and other names that got me mad, and when I went after him he ran. Furthermore, I didn't throw any dust in Hildebrand's face. It didn't go into his face, only on his sleeve. I don't know what they will do to me for this. Maybe I'll be fined or suspended for kicking on the decision, but I don't see why I should get any punishment at all. I would go into the stands again if I had to.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

On his temper flaring on May 25, 1922, when he threw dirt at an umpire and chased after a heckler in the stands, as quoted in "Ruth in Row With Umpire and Fan at Polo Grounds" in The New York Times (May 26, 1922), reprinted in Sultans of Swat: The Four Great Sluggers of the New York Yankees (2006) by The New York Times, p. 35 https://books.google.com/books?id=rvsETfrxDacC&pg=PA35

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Hugo Ball photo
Lucius Shepard photo
Alexander Pope photo

“I find myself just in the same situation of mind you describe as your own, heartily wishing the good, that is the quiet of my country, and hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Letter to Edward Blount (27 August 1714); a similar expression in "Thoughts on Various Subjects" in Swift's Miscellanies (1727): Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few.

Charles Lamb photo
Yoweri Museveni photo

“The island is in Kenya, the water is in Uganda… But the [Luos, a Kenyan ethnic group] are mad, they want to fish here but this is Uganda.”

Yoweri Museveni (1944) President of Uganda

On Migingo Island's ownership, as quoted in "Kenyan MPs' fury over island row" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8048771.stm (13 May 2009), BBC News, United Kingdom: British Broadcasting Corporation
2000s

Jack White photo
Taylor Swift photo
Thomas Hobbes photo

“To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad.”

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) English philosopher, born 1588

On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume. Quoted in Mathematical Maxims and Minims by N. Rose (1988)

William Wordsworth photo

“In Robert's experience there were two kinds of classicists, the mad and the disconcertingly sane.”

Alan Judd (1946) British writer

Page 48.
The Noonday Devil (1987)

Adin Ballou photo
Thomas Middleton photo

“He who loves the law dies either mad or poor.”

Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) English playwright and poet

The Phœnix (1603-4)

Statius photo

“Grief and mad wrath devoured his soul, and hope, heaviest of mortal cares when long deferred.”
Exedere animum dolor iraque demens et, qua non gravior mortalibus addita curis, spes, ubi longa venit.

Source: Thebaid, Book II, Line 319

Thomas Carlyle photo

“The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Latter Day Pamphlet, No. 8. (1850).
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

T.C. Boyle photo

“His hips felt as if an army of mad acupuncturists had been driving hot needles into them.”

T.C. Boyle (1948) American novelist and short story writer

Acts of God (1989)

Donald Barthelme photo
Brian Clevinger photo
Thomas Brooks photo
William Hazlitt photo

“They are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness.”

" On Actors and Acting" http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/RoundTable/ActorsActing.htm (The Examiner, 5 January 1817)
The Round Table (1815-1817)

Margaret Atwood photo

“As I was writing about Grace Marks, and about her interlude in the Asylum, I came to see her in context — the context of other people's opinions, both the popular images of madness and the scientific explanations for it available at the time. A lot of what was believed and said on the subject appears like sheer lunacy to us now. But we shouldn't be too arrogant — how many of our own theories will look silly when those who follow us have come up with something better? But whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience — who knows when such a malady may strike? When "mad," at least in literature, you aren't yourself; you take on another self, a self that is either not you at all, or a truer, more elemental one than the person you're used to seeing in the mirror. You're in danger of becoming, in Shakespeare's works, a mere picture or beast, and in Susanna Moodie's words, a mere machine; or else you may become an inspired prophet, a truth-sayer, a shaman, one who oversteps the boundaries of the ordinarily visible and audible, and also, and especially, the ordinarily sayable. Portraying this process is deep power for the artist, partly because it's a little too close to the process of artistic creation itself, and partly because the prospect of losing our self and being taken over by another, unfamiliar self is one of our deepest human fears.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

Ani DiFranco photo
Stephen Fry photo

“All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies…. God, if there’s a word that drives me mad it’s “energy” used in a nonsensical way—don’t get me started!”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

" Last Chance to Think http://www.csicop.org/si/show/stephen_fry--last_chance_to_think/" Interview (2010) by Kylie Sturgess in Skeptical Inquirer. Vol 34 (1)
2000s

Sydney Smith photo
Jim Henson photo
Sammy Cahn photo

“Call me irresponsible
Yes, I'm unreliable
But it's undeniably true
That I'm irresponsibly mad for you.”

Sammy Cahn (1913–1993) American lyricist, songwriter, musician

Call me Irresponsible (1963)
Song lyrics

Thomas Szasz photo
Gore Vidal photo

“I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?”

Charles de Lint (1951) author

"Baiting the Hook", p. 42
Memory and Dream (1994)

Tony Benn photo

“First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, Robert Andrews, Columbia University Press, 1993, ISBN 0231071949, 9780231071949. A similar quotation is almost invariably attributed to Gandhi, but more likely derives from a 1914 US trade union address:
"And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America." General Executive Board Report and Proceedings [of The] Biennial Convention, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 1914. Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=I-0UAAAAIAAJ&q=%22first+they+ignore+you%22+%22build+monuments%22&dq=%22first+they+ignore+you%22+%22build+monuments%22&lr=&as_brr=0&pgis=1
2000s

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo
Madame Nhu photo

“I may shock some by saying 'I would beat such provocateurs ten times more if they wore monks robes,' and 'I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show, for one can not be responsible for the madness of others.”

Madame Nhu (1924–2011) First lady of South Vietnam

Jones, Howard (2003). Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War. pp.292-293
"Letters to the Times: Mrs. Nhu Defends Stand", The New York Times, 14 August 1963. Referring to the self-immolation of Buddhist monks protesting government actions.

Jacques Derrida photo
Khalil Gibran photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Asahel Nettleton photo
Jorge Majfud photo

“We call reality
to madness that remains
and madness to reality that vanishes”

Jorge Majfud (1969) Uruguayan-American writer

La ciudad de la Luna (2009)

Michel Foucault photo

“The gesture that divides madness is the constitutive one, not the science that grows up in the calm that returns after the division has been made.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Preface to 1961 edition
History of Madness (1961)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman photo

“For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia — and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again — work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite — ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

"Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" in The Forerunner (October 1913) http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html

Alexander Woollcott photo
Henry Adams photo

“Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused — physics stark mad in metaphysics.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Michael Moorcock photo

“I am individual, stylish, mad and a lot of fun to be with.”

Deepak Perwani (1973) Pakistani fashion designer

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2257395/Interview-with-Deepak-Perwani

Robert M. Pirsig photo
Newton Lee photo
Roger Scruton photo

“In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Why I became a conservative," http://newcriterion.com:81/archive/21/feb03/burke.htm The New Criterion (February 2003).

Chris Rock photo
Ken Wilber photo
Edward Young photo

“Be wise today; 'tis madness to defer.”

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night I, Line 390.

“In the country of the mad, the sane man is crazy.”

Edmund Cooper (1926–1982) British writer

The Overman Culture (1971)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
James Dobson photo

“And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on.”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

regarding the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting
2012-12-17
Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk
Radio
http://www.drjamesdobson.org/Broadcasts/Broadcast?i=32d0ea7c-eeb2-41fb-9c05-f6e0c733d58a, quoted in * 2012-12-17
Dobson: Connecticut Shooting was God Allowing 'Judgment to Fall Upon Us' for Turning Our Back on Him
Kyle Mantyla
Right Wing Watch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/dobson-connecticut-shooting-was-god-allowing-judgment-fall-upon-us-turning-our-back-him
2012

José Guilherme Merquior photo

“[A] number of points are worth making at once [that challenge Foucault’s Madness and Civilization]: (1) There is ample evidence of medieval cruelty towards the insane; (2) In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the mad were already confined, to cells, jails or even cages; (3) ‘dialogue’ or no ‘dialogue’, even madness during those times was frequently connected with sin -- even in the Ship of Fools mythology; and, to that extent, it was regarded in a far less benevolent light than suggested by Foucault (pre-modern minds accepted the reality of madness -- ‘madness as a part of truth’ -- just as they accepted the reality of sin; but this does not mean they valued madness, any more than sin; (4) as Martin Schrenk (himself a severe critic Foucault) has shown, early modern madhouses developed from medieval hospitals and monasteries rather than as reopened leprosaria; (5) the Great Confinement was primarily aimed not at deviance but at poverty -- criminal poverty, crazy poverty or just plain poverty; the notion that it heralded (in the name of the rising bourgeoise) a moral segregation does not bear close scrutiny; (6) at any rate, as stressed by Klaus Doerner, another of critic of Foucault (Madmen and the Bourgeoisie, 1969), that there was no uniform state-controlled confinement: the English and German patterns, for example, strayed greatly from the Louis Quatorzian Grand Renfermement; (7) Foucault’s periodization seems to me amiss. By the late eighteenths century, confinement of the poor was generally deemed a failure; but it is then that confinement of the mad really went ahead, as so conclusively shown in statistics concerning England, France, and the United States; (8) Tuke and Pinel did not ‘invent’ mental illness. Rather, they owe much to prior therapies and often relied also on their methods; (9) moreover, in nineetenth-century England moral treatment was not that central in the medicalization of madness. Far from it: as shown by Andrew Scull, physicians saw Tukean moral therapy as a lay threat to their art, and strove to avoid it or adapt it to their own practice. Once more, Foucault’s epochal monoliths crumble before the contradictory wealth of the historical evidence.”

Source: Foucault (1985), pp. 28-29

John Updike photo

“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 4

Tod A photo
George Santayana photo

“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

https://owlquote.com/quotes/happiness-is-the-only-2jy3r26
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

Anita Dunn photo
Dana Gioia photo
Roberto Clemente photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Look upon that hour-marked round,
Listen to that fateful sound;
There my silent hand is stealing.
My more silent course revealing;
Wild, devoted Pleasure, hear, —
Stay thee on thy mad career!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(27th July 1822) Sketches from Drawings by Mr. Dagley. Sketch the First. Time arresting the Career of Pleasure.
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Barbara W. Tuchman photo
David Hume photo
Kazuo Ishiguro photo

“At least you got him to pipe down,' she said. 'Are you okay? Mad animal.”

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 1, p. 12

Albert Camus photo
John Fante photo
Orson Scott Card photo

“What a silly god, he makes everybody born bad to go to burning hell. Why so mad? All his fault!”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 4.

James Joyce photo

“To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

"Realism and Idealism in English Literature (Daniel Defoe - William Blake)," lecture, Università Popolare, Trieste (February 27-28, 1912), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, <small> ISBN 0-192-83353-7</small>], p. 179

Anaïs Nin photo
Marc Connelly photo
Charles Stross photo
Slim Burna photo

“Dirty wind, I like the way you dey wind
And the way you dey do
You fit make Timaya go mad
So fine girl, pull down your skirt ah”

Slim Burna (1988) Nigerian singer and record producer

"Shokoto" (track 9)
I'm On Fire (2013)

Bill Bailey photo

“God, I'm in the same studio as de Burgh! He may have stood right where I'm standing now… and just thought his mad thoughts. Like "I am brilliant."”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Lyrics, Misc.

“To jump occasionally into the pit is common to all who visit the mountain, and to some who keep on the plain; but the madness to which I have alluded consists in rapid alternations from the mountain to the pit”

Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786–1867) United States philosopher and banker

The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)
Context: To jump occasionally into the pit is common to all who visit the mountain, and to some who keep on the plain; but the madness to which I have alluded consists in rapid alternations from the mountain to the pit, annoying all persons who are forced, by friendship or consanguinity, to consort with the unfortunate maniacs. To remain permanently either on the pinnacle or in the abyss is deemed a species of the same disorder, though not so common.