Quotes about madness
page 7

“(…) Is not meanness also a form of madness? And is not madness the misuse of the mind? Humanity’s problem lies in this misuse of the mind only. All the treasures of nature and spirit are open to man who will use his mind rightly. (…) Fear and greed cause the misuse of the mind. The right use of mind is in the service of love, of life, of truth, of beauty.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Mind
Source: I am That, P.128.

Love, Life, Truth, Fear

“I have nothing to say to him [Ronald Reagan], because he is mad. He is foolish. He is an Israeli dog.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Interview with Marie Colvin, 20 June 1986. Sun-Sentinel http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1986-06-20/news/8602060350_1_moammar-gadhafi-white-house-wife

Dogs

“I shall also pass over the bygone times of our cruel tyrants, whose notoriety was spread over to far distant countries; so that Porphyry, that dog who in the east was always so fierce against the church, in his mad and vain style added this also, that "Britain is a land fertile in tyrants."”
Et tacens vetustos immanium tyrannorum annos, qui in aliis longe positis regionibus vulgati sunt, it ut Porphyrius rabidus orientalis adversus ecclesiam canis dementiae suae ac vanitatis stilo hoc etiam adnecteret: ""Britannia"", inquiens, ""fertilis provincia tyrannorum"".

Gildas De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae

Et tacens vetustos immanium tyrannorum annos, qui in aliis longe positis regionibus vulgati sunt, it ut Porphyrius rabidus orientalis adversus ecclesiam canis dementiae suae ac vanitatis stilo hoc etiam adnecteret: "Britannia", inquiens, "fertilis provincia tyrannorum".
Section 4.
Gildas's quotation is in fact from St. Jerome's Epistula 133.9.
De Excidio Britanniae (On the Ruin of Britain)

Dogs, Distant, Time, Country

“A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university … This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.”

Ronald David Laing book The Politics of Experience

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 104

Children, Education, Way, Universe

“If we would reach a degree of civilization higher and grander than any yet attained, we should welcome to our ample continent all the nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples, and as fast as they learn our language and comprehend the duties of citizenship, we should incorporate them into the American body politic. The outspread wings of the American eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come. As a matter of selfish policy, leaving right and humanity out of the question, we cannot wisely pursue any other course. Other governments mainly depend for security upon the sword; ours depends mainly upon the friendship of the people. In all matters, in time of peace, in time of war, and at all times, it makes its appeal to the people, and to all classes of the people. Its strength lies in their friendship and cheerful support in every time of need, and that policy is a mad one which would reduce the number of its friends by excluding those who would come, or by alienating those who are already here.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Friendship, War, People, Peace

“And are there no laws of moral health? Can they be outraged and the penalty not paid? Let a man turn out of the bright and bustling Broadway, out of the mad revel of riches and the restless, unripe luxury of ignorant men whom sudden wealth has disordered like exhilarating gas; let him penetrate through sickening stench the lairs of typhus, the dens of small-pox, the coverts of all loathsome disease and unimaginable crimes; let him see the dull, starved, stolid, lowering faces, the human heaps of utter woe, and, like Jefferson in contemplating slavery a hundred years ago in Virginia, he will murmur with bowed head, 'I tremble for this city when I remember that God is just'. Is his justice any surer in a tenement-house than it is in a State? Filth in the city is pestilence. Injustice in the State is civil war. 'Gentlemen', said George Mason, a friend and neighbor of Jefferson's, in the Convention that framed the Constitution, 'by an inscrutable chain of causes and effects Providence punishes national sins by national calamities'. 'Oh no. gentlemen, it is no such thing', replied John Rutledge of South Carolina. 'Religion and humanity have nothing to do with this question. Interest is the governing principle with nations'. The descendants of John Rutledge live in the State which quivers still with the terrible tread of Sherman and his men. Let them answer! Oh seaports and factories, silent and ruined! Oh barns and granaries, heaps of blackened desolation! Oh wasted homes, bleeding hearts, starving mouths! Oh land consumed in the fire your own hands kindled! Was not John Rutledge wrong, was not George Mason right, that prosperity which is only money in the purse, and not justice or fair play, is the most cruel traitor, and will cheat you of your heart's blood in the end?”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Men, Money, God, War

“But history shows repeatedly the madness of crowds and the irrationality of majorities. The only conceivable merit relating to majority rule lies in the fact that if we obtain monopoly decisions by this process, we will coerce fewer persons than if we permit the minority to coerce the majority. But implicit in all political voting is the necessity to coerce some so that all are controlled.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

As quoted in Bagatorials: A Book Full of Bags by John Roscoe and Ned Roscoe, Simon & Schuster, "Abstain from Beans" (1996) p. 17.

History, Decision, Personality

“The captain seemed mad. Perhaps he did not enjoy his trade. Many soldiers did not, when real warfare developed.”

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 1, Chapter 10 “Lost Hopes” (p. 336)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

“First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England would say, 'I am an English man practising the Jewish faith.' This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree. We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the 'National Jews' in many lands was cast preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews, it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd) or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

"Zionism versus Bolshevism", Illustrated Sunday Herald (February 1920)
Early career years (1898–1929)

Life, People, World, Faith

“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Dadaland (1948); Quoted in: Cosana Maria Eram (2010) The autobiographical pact: otherness and redemption in four French avant-garde artists, p. 20
Quote of Jean Arp, referring to Swiss Dada in Zurich after 1914.
1940s

Men, War, Age, World

“One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: “Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.””

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

“The Mail I’ve Seen” Saturday Review (3 August 1956)

World

“How beautiful life is! Music and dancing! The violins are sobbing. The first stopper of a bottle of champagne bangs. And now there's a mad singing and shouting. Everybody joins in and sings and shouts! Embracing, friendship, eternal friendship! How beautiful the women are! Dressed in black and red. But you are the prettiest, Hertha! … Hey, you grumblers, go to hell! Music and dancing. The violins are sobbing. Women dressed in black and red. But you are the prettiest, Hertha!”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Wie schön ist das Leben! Musik und Tanz! Die Geigen schluchzen. Der erste Sektpfropfen knallt. Und nun ein tolles Singen und Schreien. Man singt und schreit mit. Umarmung, Freundschaft, ewige Freundschaft! Welch' schöne Frauen! In schwarz und rot! Und doch bist Du die Schönste, Hertha Holk! … Heda, ihr Miesmacher, der Teufel soll euch holen! Musik und Tanz. Die Geigen schluchzen. Frauen in schwarz und rot. Und doch bist Du die Schönste, Hertha Holk!
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Life, Women, Friendship, Beauty

“Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne book Poems and Ballads

"A Ballad of Francois Villon", lines 10, 20 and 30.
Poems and Ballads (1866-89)

Sadness

“Last night Alvin just got mad, which she said would only guarantee that he’d stay stupid.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Prentice Alvin (1989), Chapter 17.

Stupidity, Night

“In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.”

J. G. Ballard book Running Wild

Running Wild (1988)

Freedom

“This Caesarean madness stops at no barrier. Without compunction it rides roughshod over those achievements of the past which have all too often had to be purchased with the heart's blood of the people. It is always ready to smother with brutal violence the last rights and the last liberties which might interfere with its plans for holding all social activities within the rigid forms set by its will. This is the great danger which threatens us today and which immediately confronts us. The success or failure of monopolistic capitalistic power plans will determine the structure of the social life of the near future.”

Rudolf Rocker book Nationalism and Culture

Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 1 "The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism"

Life, People, Failure, Success

“As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 160.

Problem, Change

“The Voice began to echo at once. It was the same Voice of old. The difference was that when he was a child he thought he knew what it was, and that he understood it, and he gave it a name; but the older and wiser he became, the more difficult he found it to say what it was, or to understand it, except that he felt it called him away from other people and the responsibilities of life to the place where it alone reigned... Ah, sweet Voice, he said, and filled his lungs with the cool evening breeze of the north, but he did not dare open his arms to it for fear that people might think he was mad.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

Life, People, Fear, Understanding

“I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of "Women's Rights," with all its attendant horrors… Were women to "unsex" themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen, and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”

Victoria of the United Kingdom (1819–1901) British monarch who reigned 1837–1901

In an 1870 letter, quoted for example in All For Love: Seven Centuries of Illicit Liaison by Val Horsler (2006), p. 104 http://books.google.com/books?id=PFyvAAAAIAAJ&q=%22most+anxious+to+enlist%22#search_anchor. At the bottom of this page http://www.historyofwomen.org/suffrage.html, it is mentioned that the comment was written in a letter to Sir Theodore Martin in reaction to news "that Viscountess Amberley had become president of the Bristol and West of England Women's Suffrage Society and had addressed a ... public meeting on the subject." The author of the page, Helena Wojtczak, says here http://www.historyofwomen.org/about.html that while other sources often fail to give the context, she "researched and discovered the source of the quote".

Women, Men, Hate

“Als thai haf wryten and sayd
Haf I alle in myn Inglis layd,
In symple speche as I couthe,
That is lightest in mannes mouthe.
I mad noght for no disours,
Ne for no seggers, no harpours,
Bot for the luf of symple men
That strange Inglis can not ken.”

Robert Mannyng (1275–1338) English chronicler

Chronicle, line 71.

Men

“Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.”
Nihil aliud esse ebrietatem quam voluntariam insaniam.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXXIII: On Drunkenness, Line 18.

“In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"The Justice of Dame Kind", p. 464
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

“I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

Hurt

“I have read and re-read the Arusha Declaration and found nothing wrong with it except perhaps replacing a few commas here and there… it was clear for some of us that it would only be a mad man who would stand up and defend the Arusha Declaration.”

Julius Nyerere (1922–1999) Tanzanian politician and writer, first Prime Minister and President of Tanzania

Defending the Arusha Declaration, 1995. Culture of submission killing Africa - Soyinka http://thecitizen.co.tz/newe.php?id=12004

Reading

“For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Biblical and religious stories. That other fount of Western civilization as we know it today — the Greek classics — went largely unknown until the Renaissance. For our purposes, there's a noteworthy difference between these two literatures: in the Bible people are hardly ever said to be mad as such, whereas in Greek drama they go off their rockers with alarming frequency. It was the rediscovery of the classics that stimulated the long procession of literary madpeople of the past four hundred years.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

People, Books, Literature, Reading

“It's hard to think that in cities there's men who are goin' to mad,
Each strivin' to beat his fellows and get what the others had;
And from this here peaceful viewpoint, such doin's look bad, plum bad.”

Arthur Chapman (poet) (1873–1935) American poet and newspaper columnist

The Herder's Reverie, st. 3. Out Where the West Begins and Other Western Verses http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#outbk (1917)

Men, Peace, Thinking

“Ding Gou’er was born in 1941 and married in 1965. It was garden variety marriage, with husband and wife getting along well enough, and producing one child, a darling little boy. He had a mistress who was sometimes adorable and sometimes downright spooky. Sometimes she was like the sun, at other times he moon. Sometimes she was a seductive feline, at other times a mad dog. The idea of divorcing his wife appealed to him, but not enough to actually go through with it. Staying with his mistress was tempting, but not enough to actually do it. Anytime he took sick, he fantasized the onset of cancer, yet was terrified by the thought of the disease; he loved life dearly, and was tired to death of it. He had trouble being decisive. He often stuck the muzzle of his pistol against his temple, then brought it back down; another frequent site of this game was his chest, specifically the area over his heart. One thing and one thing only pleased him without exception or diminution: investigating and solving criminal cases.”

Mo Yan book The Republic of Wine

Source: The Republic of Wine (1992), Chapter I, Section 1

Love, Life, Death, Marriage

“Secondly, the student is trained to accept historical mis-statements on the authority of the book. If education is a pre- paration for adult life, he learns first to accept without question, and later to make his own contribution to the creation of historical fallacies, and still later to perpetuate what he has learnt. In this way, ignorant authors are leading innocent students to hysterical conclusions. The process of the writers' mind provides excellent material for a manual on logical fallacies. Thirdly, the student is told nothing about the relationship between evidence and truth. The truth is what the book ordains and the teacher repeats. No source is cited. No proof is offered. No argument is presented. The authors play a dangerous game of winks and nods and faints and gestures with evidence. The art is taught well through precept and example. The student grows into a young man eager to deal in assumptions but inapt in handling inquiries. Those who become historians produce narratives patterned on the textbooks on which they were brought up. Fourthly, the student is compelled to face a galling situation in his later years when he comes to realize that what he had learnt at school and college was not the truth. Imagine a graduate of one of our best colleges at the start of his studies in history in a university in Europe. Every lecture he attends and every book he reads drive him mad with exasperation, anger and frustration. He makes several grim discoveries. Most of the "facts", interpretations and theories on which he had been fostered in Pakistan now turn out to have been a fata morgana, an extravaganza of fantasies and reveries, myths and visions, whims and utopias, chimeras and fantasies.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

Life, Truth, Books, Education

“.. everything has conspired to keep from me the leisure and quiet which I could wish in order to answer you. I have also made two journeys to Paris, the last one to attend the funeral of poor Emile Diaz [son of the Barbizon-painter Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, ] of whom you ask news. His poor father was almost mad with grief, which, however, we managed to calm. You were as if present, and our thoughts associated you with the sad scene. During the return my wife was taken ill, and day by day a neuralgic attack came on which has left her very feeble. I do not know what to do, my dear friend. At the commencement I had thought of leaving her at Martigues, but now her mental condition would not permit of my leaving her. She would be afraid of being ill without me there beside her. I think I had better wait until the result of this last attack shall have left her.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

Quote from Rousseau's letter to Ziem, 1856; as cited in The Barbizon School of Painters: Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Millet, Daubigny, etc., by D. C. Thomson; Scribner and Welford, New York 1890 – (copy nr. 78), pp. 135-136
The quiet life at Barbizon was at this time broken by the death of the only son of Díaz, and by the mental distortion of Rousseau's own wife
1851 - 1867

Sadness, Thinking, Waiting

“It is folly to anticipate evils, and madness to create imaginary ones.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

4 August 1796
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)

Evil

“She is a half-mad old bag lady. The Finchley Whinger.”

Tony Banks (1942–2006) British politician

An MP who took no prisoners, The Daily Telegraph, 2006-01-09 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/01/09/nbanks109.xml, http://www.geocities.com/Axiom43/insults.html on former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher again.

“Madness blew so violently on the immeasurable air pump of the circuit, that it took the form of a spiral, rising like a screw to the Zenith.. [describing the Brescia automobile races, in 1907]”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

In 'La mort tient le volant...', in La ville charnelle, E. Sansot, Paris 1908, p. 228; as quoted in Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, by Christine Poggi, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 27, (note 77)
1900's

“As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch — not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward — a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Death, Women, Men, World

“I suppose I’ve been knocking on heaven’s door for about 11 years now, with one sort of high or another. The only kinds of drugs I use, though, are ones that keep me working for longer periods of time. I haven’t gotten involved in anything heavy since ’68. I had a silly flirtation with smack then, but it was only for the mystery and enigma of trying it. I never really enjoyed it at all. I like fast drugs. I’ve said that many times. I hate falling out, where I can’t stand up and stuff. It seems like such a waste of time. I hate downs and slow drugs like grass. I hate sleep. I would much prefer staying up, just working, all the time. It makes me so mad that we can’t do anything about sleep or the common cold.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

As quoted in this interview http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/david-bowie-playboy-magazine/ in Playboy magazine (September 1976)

Hate, Sleep, Grass, Time

“…Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

Sarah Vowell book Take the Cannoli

On the Godfather and family
Take the Cannoli (2000)

Family, Home

“I wanted to go away, in the midst of something entirely different,
I had been there, in the house of torture,
I have seen people being kicked, men’s bodies scorched,
nails pulled out with pliers.
Armed with flame and cudgels, grinning men in shirt sleeves.
Where I could hear my friends being thrown headlong
down the stairs.
Night was as day, and long shrieks wounded me.
In vain I tried to think of wooded lanes and flowers,
a serene life and human words.
The thought seized up, it was as if a wound were opened up
again and again and endlessly searched.
From the mouth struck, teeth and blood came out,
and lamenting moans from the deep throat.
Away, away from that house, from that street and town,
from anything similar to it.
I must save myself, keep up my mind,
that I should not be led to madness by these memories.
Oh, if we could go back to a void, from which a new order,
a maternal opening could come forth,
if I hear a certain tone of voice even in jest, I shudder.
My unhappiness is that I avoid the sight of suffering,
hospitals and prisons.
I have yearned for high solitudes, lands of still sunshine
and sweet shadows,
but I would always be pursued by the ghosts of human beings.
All of a sudden I feel the need of distraction and play,
to lose myself in the noise of the fairground.
I remain with you, but forgive me
if you see me sometimes act like a madman.
I try to heal myself by myself, as an animal,
trusting that the wounds will close.
I stop to listen to the simple conversations of the women
in the marketplace, with their dialectical lilt.
I rejoice at the footsteps of running children,
their overpowering calls.
Because you do not know the absurdity of my dreams,
the fixed expressions, the incomprehensible gestures.
There is turmoil inside me, which seems to ridicule me.
And I cannot cry out, not to be like them.
Tomorrow I will go towards some music, now I am getting ready.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Life, Women, Men, Children

“The moral ideal has disappeared in all that has to do with international relations. The gain-seeking impulse supported by brute force has taken its place, and so far as the surface of things is concerned human civilization has gone back a full thousand years. Inconceivable though it be, we are brought face to face in this twentieth century with governments of peoples once great and highly civilized, whose word now means absolutely nothing. A pledge is something not to be kept, but to be broken. Cruelty and national lust have displaced human feeling and friendly international co-operation. Human life has no value, and the savings of generations are wasted month by month and almost day by day in mad attempts to dominate the whole world in pursuit of gain.
How has all this been possible? What has happened to the teachings and inspiring leadership of the great prophets and apostles of the mind, who for nearly three thousand years have been holding before mankind a vision of the moral ideal supported by intellectual power? What has become of the influence and guidance of the great religions Christian, Moslem, Hebrew, Buddhist with their counsels of peace and good-will, or of those of Plato and of Aristotle, of St. Augustine and of St. Thomas Aquinas, and of the outstanding captains of the mind Spanish, Italian, French, English, German who have for hundreds of years occupied the highest place in the citadel of human fame? The answer to these questions is not easy. Indeed, it sometimes seems impossible.
Are we, then, of this twentieth century and of this still free and independent land to lose heart and to yield to the despair which is becoming so widespread in countries other than ours? Not for one moment will we yield our faith or our courage! We may well repeat once more the words of Abraham Lincoln: "Most governments have been based on the denial of the equal rights of men, ours began by affirming those rights. We made the experiment, and the fruit is before us. Look at it think of it!"
However dark the skies may seem now, however violent and apparently irresistible are the savage attacks being made with barbarous brutality upon innocent women and children and non-combatant men, upon hospitals and institutions for the care of the aged and dependent, upon cathedrals and churches, upon libraries and galleries of the world s art, upon classic monuments which record the architectural achievements of centuries we must not despair. Our spirit of faith in the ultimate rule of the moral ideal and in the permanent establishment of liberty of thought, of speech, of worship and of government will not, and must not, be permitted to weaken or to lose control of our mind and our action.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

Life, Women, Men, Children

“Here we are, sixty something human minds. We’ve been migrated—while still awake—right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we’re now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn’t let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother’s old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 184

Way, Home, Intelligence, Idea

“What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice — that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations — Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

Learning, Personality

“To be sane in a mad time
is bad for the brain, worse
for the heart.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment" in The Country of Marriage (1973).
Poems

Time, Heart

“In Russia - Poets are considered a danger to the political system and are sent into Asylums.
What a compliment to the Russian People
that poetry could move them so.
In NZ Poets are not considered a danger.
No one reads poetry
Poets aren't sent to Asylums but they are considered mad nonetheless”

Tim Shadbolt (1947) New Zealand politician

From the introduction to "Concrete Reality"

People, Reading

“As to the word itself, it is generally allowed to be of Greek extraction. But whence the Greek word, enthousiasmos, is derived, none has yet been able to show. Some have endeavoured to derive it from en theoi, in God; because all enthusiasm has reference to him. … It is not improbable, that one reason why this uncouth word has been retained in so many languages was, because men were not better agreed concerning the meaning than concerning the derivation of it. They therefore adopted the Greek word, because they did not understand it: they did not translate it into their own tongues, because they knew not how to translate it; it having been always a word of a loose, uncertain sense, to which no determinate meaning was affixed.
It is not, therefore, at all surprising, that it is so variously taken at this day; different persons understanding it in different senses, quite inconsistent with each other. Some take it in a good sense, for a divine impulse or impression, superior to all the natural faculties, and suspending, for the time, either in whole or in part, both the reason and the outward senses. In this meaning of the word, both the Prophets of old, and the Apostles, were proper enthusiasts; being, at divers times, so filled with the Spirit, and so influenced by Him who dwelt in their hearts, that the exercise of their own reason, their senses, and all their natural faculties, being suspended, they were wholly actuated by the power of God, and “spake” only “as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”
Others take the word in an indifferent sense, such as is neither morally good nor evil: thus they speak of the enthusiasm of the poets; of Homer and Virgil in particular. And this a late eminent writer extends so far as to assert, there is no man excellent in his profession, whatsoever it be, who has not in his temper a strong tincture of enthusiasm. By enthusiasm these appear to understand, all uncommon vigour of thought, a peculiar fervour of spirit, a vivacity and strength not to be found in common men; elevating the soul to greater and higher things than cool reason could have attained.
But neither of these is the sense wherein the word “enthusiasm” is most usually understood. The generality of men, if no farther agreed, at least agree thus far concerning it, that it is something evil: and this is plainly the sentiment of all those who call the religion of the heart “enthusiasm.” Accordingly, I shall take it in the following pages, as an evil; a misfortune, if not a fault. As to the nature of enthusiasm, it is, undoubtedly a disorder of the mind; and such a disorder as greatly hinders the exercise of reason. Nay, sometimes it wholly sets it aside: it not only dims but shuts the eyes of the understanding. It may, therefore, well be accounted a species of madness; of madness rather than of folly: seeing a fool is properly one who draws wrong conclusions from right premisses; whereas a madman draws right conclusions, but from wrong premisses. And so does an enthusiast suppose his premisses true, and his conclusions would necessarily follow. But here lies his mistake: his premisses are false. He imagines himself to be what he is not: and therefore, setting out wrong, the farther he goes, the more he wanders out of the way.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Sermon 37 "The Nature of Enthusiasm"
Sermons on Several Occasions (1771)

Men, God, Religion, Fools

“… I fail to believe that Hitler's war – the most terrible in history – was merely due to economic causes, and not to something deeper and more sinister in human outlook and beliefs. … It was an ideology and not merely materialism. It was an ideological obsession, a madness, which can operate as disastrously in nations as in individuals. …”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Addressing the Canada Club in Ottawa on 29 June 1945, after the United Nations Charter was finalized, as quoted by Louise W. Holborn (ed., 1948) in War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, p. 719

War, History

“Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Greybeard

Source: Greybeard (1964), Chapter 3 (p. 91)

Love, War, Art, Reality

“Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.”

Tim O'Brien (1946) American novelist

Source: In the Lake of The Woods (1994), p. 87

Life

“We renounce all your spectacles, as strongly as we renounce the matters originating them, which we know were conceived of superstition, when we give up the very things which are the basis of their representations. Among us nothing is ever said, or seen, or heard, which has anything in common with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theatre, the atrocities of the arena, the useless exercises of the wrestling-ground.”

Tertullian (155–220) Christian theologian

Source: Apologeticus pro Christianis, Chapter 38

Exercises

“Movie critics have complained that the movie lacks coherent vision. The fault may not be Stone's. We know what [Alexander] did, and it continues to astonish us, but we don't know how or why he did it…Stone suggests some noble purpose for Alexander's mad, bloody tromp across Asia. He and his historical consultant shared a need to give meaning to a meaningless conquest.”

Eugene N. Borza (1935) American historian

About the film Alexander (film) http://www.maknews.com/html/borza_on_alexander.html (December 3, 2004)

“When the ghost comes round at midnight
Well you both can have some fun
He can drive you mad, he can make you sad
He can keep you from the sun
When they take him down, he'll be both safe and sound
And the hand does fit the glove
And no matter what they tell you,
There's good and evil in everyone.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Who Was That Masked Man
Song lyrics, Veedon Fleece (1974)

Sadness, Evil, Sun

“[A]nd between this top-quality programming are the most miserable adverts in the world – former Mancunian top cop John Stalker trying to sell you sun awnings; trying to get you to blot out every ray of light from the world for those in the grip of manic depression – 'Hello, I'm John Stalker. Are you, like me, tired of the pitiless glare of an English summer; maddened by the relentless gaze of cruel Helios; sick of lurking in your house all summer long, like a mad bloke in a siege situation - such as I would have dealt with in my high-flying career? Well, suffer no longer. Install Gloom Master sun awnings - summer bang to rights!' Terrible! Then it all gets worse with those terrible loan adverts. These awful, tragic, hollow-eyed wraiths come on, telling you these awful stories - 'I'm up to my eyes in debt, and, curiously, no reputable company would give me another loan! Then I discovered Dodgy Bastards. They've given me a million pounds, and all they want in return are my kidneys.' No, don't do it! And then - worse than that - the accident insurance adverts - 'Where there's blame, there's a claim”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

when people who've had these accidents come on like medieval beggars, and wave their stumps at you for money with these outlandish stories - 'I slipped on a banana skin and successfully sued the Dominican Republic...' (Wrap up Warm tour, May 2004)
Stand-up

Money, People, World, Light

“As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But – as the Genesis myth also teaches – there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (pp. 79-80)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Life, Way, Nature, Knowledge

“I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch's Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don't exist. But you do believe that it is really I?”

Mikhail Bulgakov book The Master and Margarita

Book Two in 'The Extraction of the Master, P/V, here Woland addresses the Master about Ivan (alias "Homless")
The Master and Margarita (1967)

Pleasure

“Made still a blund'ring kind of melody;
Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in.
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad.”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. II, line 413.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

Sense

“Any madness in us gains from being expressed, because in this way one gives a human form to what separates us from humanity.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Lectures on Philosophy (1959), p. 76

Way

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
Mere Christianity (1952)

Life, God, War, Peace

“And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

Remarks to Pat Robertson after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on The 700 Club (13 September 2001) (audio recording) https://home.comcast.net/~joe.grabko/falwell.mp3; more at "Falwell and Above" at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/rumors/falwell.htm Falwell later told CNN: I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize. CNN (14 September 2001) Falwell: "If we decide to change all the rules on which this Judeo-Christian nation was built we cannot expect the Lord to put his shield of protection around us as he has in the past." Amanpour: "So you still stand by that." Falwell: "I stand right by it." Interviewed by CNN's Christiana Amanpour about his current feelings regarding blame for the September 11th attacks, and whether or not he still feels as he did when he made the conversial statement cited above (8 May 2007) (video recording) http://www.americablog.com/2007/05/cnn-just-last-week-falwell-reiterated.html. This statement attesting that he still blamed so many was made one week before his death.

God, People, School, Way

“p>…[E]ach moment of joy but prompts the more
That madness buried at the base of dreamy souls,
That sadness in the dark citadel of the heart,
And in sorrowful eyes, images of innocence from the past.
All the Past is but an endless string of days,
All the Future is but a series of graves not yet fulfilled…
In the summer sun, fresh leaves begin to change in hue,
Weaving the autumn whose arrival is imminent—as in our lives
The green days follow in fading succession,
Weaving the shroud that covers our souls.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"The Graves", as quoted in Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), pp. 163–164

Sadness, Soul, Autumn, Change

“It’s been well said—and by many people in many circumstances—that whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. These people in the Deep South were mad because they could have elected Douglas, and Douglas would have given them everything they wanted—everything that they wanted that was consistent with his election in the free states.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

God, People

“For six years, the only consistent thing about our national drug policy has been its inconsistency. Harsher penalties, urine testing, hysteria, budget cuts and the simplistic "Just Say No!' campaign (the equivalent of telling manic depressives to "just cheer up") have returned drug education and treatment to the Reefer Madness era.”

Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) American political and social activist

"Reefer Madness" in The Nation (21 November 1987) http://www.marijuanalibrary.org/Nation_Hoffman_112187.html.

Education, Penalty

“People call this beautiful? - no, they are crazy, or I am mad! – How I learned now at Oosterbeek [c. 1834-36 that I should look at Nature completely different! In the beginning I could not make anything good; I soon realized that I had to start all over again.”

Johannes Warnardus Bilders (1811–1890) painter from the Northern Netherlands

version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Warnardus Bilders, in Nederlands): Moet dat nu mooi heeten? - neen, de menschen zijn gek, of ik! - Wat leerde ik nu te Oosterbeek die Natuur gansch anders aankijken! In 't begin kon ik niets goeds maken; ik zag al gauw, dat ik weer van voren af aan moest beginnen.
p. 78
1880's, Johannes Warnardus Bilders' (1887/1900)

People, Beauty, Nature, Learning

“I am a Black revolutionary, and, by definition, that makes me a part of the Black Liberation Army. The pigs have used their newspapers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals. They have called us gangsters and gun molls and have compared us to such characters as john dillinger and ma barker. It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the criminals.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

Dogs, Thinking, Parting, Painting

“My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States … In some awful way, his regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs. This is not at all like watching the implosion of an obvious huckster and jerk like Michael Moore, who would have made a perfectly good Brownshirt populist. The collapse of Chomsky feels to me more like tragedy.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Love, Poverty and War" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C78DC231-4599-4745-9CA5-A398398916A0, FrontPageMagazine.com (2004-12-29): On Noam Chomsky 2000s, 2004

War, Dogs, Jerk, Way

“I want to tell you that I was so damn mad when that Supreme Court had to come down. First, I didn't like the decision. Unbelievable, wasn't it? You know, those clowns we got on there, I tell you, I hope I outlive the bastards.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

After the US Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States (The Pentagon Papers Case).
2000s

Hope, Decision

“You know, people criticize me for talking about her because I had an affair with her husband, and I don’t blame them for that, I understand that. I understand that they can be mad at me. I get it. I accept my responsibility. … But she’s never accepted her responsibility at being an enabler. She’s been an enabler that has encouraged him to go out and do whatever he does with women. Woman’s rights. Ha! I personally have worked my tail off to get where I am in the entertainment business, which has not been easy since the Clinton scandal, by the way. … Hillary never put up a shingle and worked for her clients and built her clientele. She always got things on the back of her husband. … I think it’s a joke that she would run on women’s issues.”

Gennifer Flowers (1950) American actress and model

HILLARY NIGHTMARE: GENNIFER'S BACK! https://www.wnd.com/2015/10/hillary-nightmare-gennifers-back/ (October 11, 2015)

Women, People, Way, Understanding

“The Seventh Seal is one of the few films really close to my heart. Actually, I don't know why. It's certainly far from perfect. I had to contend with all sorts of madness, and one can detect here and there the speed with which it was made. But I find it even, strong, and vital.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Images : My Life in Films (1990)

Strong, Heart, Speed, Perfection

“Every war already carries within it the war that will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything is smashed. That is why I am so wholeheartedly for a radical end to this madness and why my only hope is in world socialism.”

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) German artist

Diary entry (21 February 1944).
The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

War, World, Hope

“All primitive people thought that a lunatic was possessed by a spirit. When his incoherent words more or less accord with the moral prejudices of the time, the spirit is a good one, and the man i s a saint. In the opposite case, the spirit is evil and the man must be suppressed. It is just according to the time and place and the doctors, whether a prophetess would be worshipped as a priestess or ducked as a witch. Innumerable violent lunatics have escaped the cells, thanks to the War, and their very violence has made heroes of them. And in every Parliament there are at least five or six undisputed idiots who got elected for their madness through the admiration of their constituents.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

War, People, Evil, Time

“Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.”

Edward Bond Lear

Lear (1972), Act III, sc. iii

““And Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself.”
Acts 26:24.
And so say all the world, the men who know not God, of all that are of Paul’s religion: of every one who is so a follower of him as he was of Christ. It is true, there is a sort of religion, nay, and it is called Christianity too, which may be practised without any such Imputation, which is generally allowed to be consistent with common sense, —that is, a religion of form, a round of outward duties, performed in a decent, regular manner. You may add orthodoxy thereto, a system of right opinions, yea, and some quantity of heathen morality; and yet not many will pronounce, that “much religion hath made you mad.” But if you aim at the religion of the heart, if you talk of “righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost,” then it will not be long before your sentence is passed, “Thou art beside thyself.””

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Sermons on Several Occasions (1771) Source: Sermon 37 "The Nature of Enthusiasm" http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/sermons.v.xxxvii.html

Men, God, World, Peace

“Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!”

G. K. Chesterton book The Napoleon of Notting Hill

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

World

“You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Address to the State Committee of the Liberal Party in New York City, Faith in Liberalism ( pdf http://www.adlaitoday.org/ideas/archive/care1_liberalism_08-28-52.pdf) (28 August 1952)

“Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 154.

Truth, Reality, Falseness

“I think all these new sculptors [after World War 2. ] – he Anthony Caro is not all that young though – are taking stand against abominable architecture since the war and I think rightly so. But again I feel it's not enough to be against something. You have to do something that will damn well replace it. Where do you put these sculptures?... I like to think that time is timeless and I wouldn't want to make a work which wouldn't last for more than ten years – nor a work that wouldn't go anywhere. It would make me terrible mad. Mind you, I have to wait to find for my work. It doesn't happen all that easily, but it does happen. It slips in somewhere. Before the war the architects were very much one with the sculptors, painters, everybody. We thought alike. Then the war was over.... the architects gave up coming to look at sculpture and painting.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Art Talk, conversations with 15 woman artists', (1975), p. 22

War, World, Feeling, Thinking

“I am too old for adventure," the Judge said, putting his clippers away, "but I hope I am not too old to do what I feel is right. There is an old woman out there someplace who has probably gone to a miserable death because she felt it was right. Prompted by religious mania, I have no doubt. But people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand (1978), p. 810

Death, People, Hope, Feeling

“A knight errant who turns mad for a reason deserves neither merit nor thanks. The thing is to do it without cause.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Unplaced as yet by chapter

“I'm just mad about Saffron
Saffron's mad about me
I'm just mad about Saffron
She's just mad about me.”

Donovan (1946) Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist

Mellow Yellow (1966)

“I had long known that there was something about me that was either violent or frightening for some reason. In certain three-sided clothing store images I had for some years come upon myself, with shock and disbelief, regret, and shame, disappointment and despair, for I am indeed clearly violent, mad, and ugly, all because of intensity of some kind, a tension, an obsession with getting everything that there was to be got, a passion, an insanity.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang in Forever (1976)

Disappointment, Passion, Despair, Clothes

“The young generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature; they, without being mad, could worship Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Men, Children, World, Nature

“If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong.”

Greg Kroah-Hartman Linux kernel developer

Comment posted on Reddit (1 December 2014) https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2ny1lz/im_greg_kroahhartman_linux_kernel_developer_ama/cmhysmb

“"Now he took the music of like Mandrill, like "Fencewalk", certain disco records that had funky percussion breaks like The Incredible Bongo Band when they came out with "Apache" and he just kept that beat going. It might be that certain part of the record that everybody waits for--they just let their inner self go and get wild. The next thing you know the singer comes back in and you'd be mad."”

Afrika Bambaataa (1957) American DJ, record producer and activist

Afrika Bambaataa, quoted in David Toop (1991). Rap Attack 2: African Rap To Global Hip Hop, p.60. New York. New York: Serpent's Tail. .

Music, Waiting, Parting

“We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.”

Charles Baudelaire book La Fanfarlo

Nous avons psychologisé comme les fous, qui augmentent leur folie en s’efforçant de la comprendre. "La Fanfarlo" (1847) http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Fanfarlo

Understanding

“Dear Sister, You dream like mad, you love like tinder, you aspire like a star-struck moth - for what? That you may hive little lyrics, and sell to a publisher for thirty pieces of silver.”

Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947) British writer

Opening Lines from Epistle Dedicatory, to his sister, Sissie Le Gallienne English Poems Copland & Day 1895 kindle ebook.

Love, Dreams, Star, Sister

“Time's arrow of “just history” marks each moment of time with a distinctive brand. But we cannot, in our quest to understand history, be satisfied only with a mark to recognize each moment and a guide to order events in temporal sequence. Uniqueness is the essence of history, but we also crave some underlying generality, some principles of order transcending the distinction of moments—lest we be driven mad by Borges's vision of a new picture every two thousand pages in a book without end. We also need, in short, the immanence of time's cycle.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Source: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), p. 196

Books, History, Understanding, Time

“She talks about how Brahms baby sat them while her mother, Clara, was out earning a living, concertizing all over Europe. Brahms continued in their lives until his death. She also talks about her loving relationship with her mother; her usual sibling like relationships with the other Schumann children; and how she would get mad at Brahms when he would make her mother sad, even cry, but none of them could be mad at Brahms for very long.”

Harry Markowitz (1927) American economist

On Eugene Schumann http://www.amazon.com/review/R280VQKJ4LC7OI

Love, Death, Children, Sadness

“I'm no fighter. Besides, Willie is too big. And he is a real nice man. All those big fellows—Ted Kluszewski, Gil Hodges, Frank Howard—they're nice fellows. I saw Howard get mad only once. He picked up an umpire by his ears and held him like a puppy!”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Responding to a fellow diner's tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Clemente turn to boxing, with teammate Willie Stargell as his first opponent; as quoted in "Sidelights on Sports: Whirl Around the World of Sports" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=PcpRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=bGwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7225%2C5232152 by Al Abrams, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Saturday, September 30, 1967), p. 7 Other, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1967</big>

“Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[1992Jul2.222039.26476@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

Hell

“…in the Restoration period, feeling and imagination were mistrusted: feeling implied strong convictions, and strong convictions had produced a Civil War and the harsh rule of the Commonwealth; imagination suggested the mad, the wild, the uncouth, the fanatical. It was best to live a calm civilised life governed by reason. Such a life is best lived in the town, and the town is the true centre of culture; the country estates are impoverished, and little of interest is going on there; the country itself is barbaric.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, War, Feeling, Imagination

“The instinct to synthesize is a good one so long as it is concerned with elements that are capable of forming a whole. But today the man in the street is fed, morally as well as physically, on a mass of debris which has no resemblance to a nourishing diet. There is no method in this madness, which is the very negation of culture.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 35

“In the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, madness too provided the dénouement, but it did so in liberating the truth. It still opened onto language, to a renewed form of speech, that of explanation and of the real regained. The most it could ever be was the penultimate moment of tragedy. Not the closing moment, as in Andromaque, where no truth appears, other than, in Delirium, the truth of a passion that finds its fullest, most perfect expression in madness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
History of Madness (1961)

Truth, Appearance, Passion, Perfection

“As Hamas's charter makes clear, Hamas's immediate goal is to destroy Israel. But Hamas has a broader objective. They also want a caliphate. Hamas shares the global ambitions of its fellow militant Islamists. That’s why its supporters wildly cheered in the streets of Gaza as thousands of Americans were murdered on 9/11. And that's why its leaders condemned the United States for killing Osama bin Laden, whom they praised as a holy warrior.So when it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas. And what they share in common, all militant Islamists share in common. Boko Haram in Nigeria; Ash-Shabab in Somalia; Hezbollah in Lebanon; An-Nusrah in Syria; The Mahdi Army in Iraq; And the Al-Qaeda branches in Yemen, Libya, the Philippines, India and elsewhere. Some are radical Sunnis, some are radical Shi'ites. Some want to restore a pre-medieval caliphate from the 7th century. Others want to trigger the apocalyptic return of an imam from the 9th century. They operate in different lands, they target different victims and they even kill each other in their quest for supremacy. But they all share a fanatic ideology. They all seek to create ever expanding enclaves of militant Islam where there is no freedom and no tolerance – Where women are treated as chattel, Christians are decimated, and minorities are subjugated, sometimes given the stark choice: convert or die. For them, anyone can be an infidel, including fellow Muslims. Ladies and Gentlemen, Militant Islam's ambition to dominate the world seems mad. But so too did the global ambitions of another fanatic ideology that swept to power eight decades ago. The Nazis believed in a master race. The militant Islamists believe in a master faith. They just disagree about who among them will be the master… of the master faith. That's what they truly disagree about. Therefore, the question before us is whether militant Islam will have the power to realize its unbridled ambitions.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Speech at the United Nations General Assembly (September 2014), New York City, New York. As quoted in The Jerusalem Post https://web.archive.org/save/http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Full-text-of-Prime-Minister-Netanyahus-UN-speech-376626. 2010s, 2014

Women, World, Faith, Question

“They say, O my God, that I am mad because I see no fault in Thee; but if I am indeed mad with Thy love, I do not wish to recover my sanity.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

Love, God

“You were founding members of the mighty SMU Mob, bouncing like mad and watching in wonder as your then-Student Body President, Señor Lobster, danced with joy after all those Pony victories right here in Moody. And you'll think back to those carefree fall game days on the Boulevard – though I don’t recall seeing too many of you in the football stadium.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2010s, 2015, Remarks at the SMU 100th Spring Commencement (May 2015)

Game, Thinking, Victory, Joy

“I'm not mad at you I'm mad a the cheese-steak.”

Kerry Jackson

Radio From Hell (June 9, 2006)

“.. At the end of the month I should like to go to the hospital at St. Remy or another institution of this kind. What comforts me a little, is that I am beginning to consider madness as a disease like any other and accept the thing as such, whereas during the crises themselves, I thought that everything I imagined was real... After all... I have perhaps still some almost normal years in front of me.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, France, 21 April 1889; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 585), p 25 1880s, 1889

Disease, Imagination

“The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man.”

Oliver Goldsmith book The Vicar of Wakefield

Source: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ch. 17, An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, st. 5.

Dogs

“I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad, or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind? And, although I do not necessarily agree with the paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin's advocacy of evolution as a major proof of the glory of God, de Chardin's attitude is both logical and inspiring. A creator who laid the foundations for the entire future at the beginning of time is far more awesome than a clumsy tinkerer who constantly modifies his creations and throws away entire species in the process.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids, essay for journal Science, pp 1532-3 (5 June 1998)
1990s

God, People, Imagination, Intelligence

“Among its [Boresko's] curiosities is a high rock, which overhangs a fearful precipice, whose bottom is just as much below the surface of the surrounding country as the summit of the rock is above the surface. From its summit the rock presents the most enchanting views that the country affords… The atmosphere exerts, however, a medical influence. While inhaling it, each person possesses in imagination whatever he desires at the moment: riches, health, power, or even a lady's love. The place is appropriately termed the pinnacle of hope. …Hither come …all persons who wish to cheat the present moment of its anguish by pleasant anticipations of the future. Occasionally, however, a peculiar madness seizes the visiters, and they jump from the delightful pinnacle into the abyss below, whose noxious vapours prostrate all the energies of life, and reverse all the reveries of hope.”

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

The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)

Love, Life, Health, Fear

“Sometimes people stop me in the street and ask me eef I am Harry Belafonte. When I say no, they get mad and walk away.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Clemente Keeps Them On Their Toes" by Larry Klein, in Sport (October 1960), p. 96 Comment: While they may have been the first, Pittsburghers were clearly not the last to perceive this likeness. On August 18, 1973 (the day Clemente would've turned 39), Belafonte was pegged by Screen Gems (producers of Brian's Song) to star in what would prove to be but the first of several planned but never realized Clemente biopics. https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zCAsAAAAIBAJ&sjid=850FAAAAIBAJ&pg=3049%2C4375173&dq=screen-gems-made-for-tv-film-roberto-clemente-harry-belafonte Other, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1960</big>

People