Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 5
“Driven raving mad by love—and he a man who had been always esteemed for his great prudence.”
Che per amor venne in furore e matto,
d'huom che si saggio era stimato prima.
Canto I, stanza 2 (tr. Guido Waldman); of Orlando.
Orlando Furioso (1532)
“a man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away the more he had.”
Source: The Pilgrim's Progress
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)
“Why should man be afraid to think, and why should he fear to express his thoughts?”
Heretics and Heresies (1874)
Context: Why should man be afraid to think, and why should he fear to express his thoughts?
Is it possible that an infinite Deity is unwilling that a man should investigate the phenomena by which he is surrounded? Is it possible that a god delights in threatening and terrifying men? What glory, what honor and renown a god must win on such a field! The ocean raving at a drop; a star envious of a candle; the sun jealous of a fire-fly.
Diogenes, 6.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 6: The Cynics
1963 interview, used in The Century of the Self (2002)
Context: My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call "happiness." There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.
