“In a mad world, only the mad are sane!”
Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) Japanese film maker
Ran (1985)
Variant: In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
Castine asked as she followed him around to the front of the Saturn. “I used to live there. I think I still have pictures.”
Source: Forced Perspectives (2020), Chapter 13, “Would You Prevent God?” (p. 230)
“In a mad world, only the mad are sane!”
Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) Japanese film maker
Ran (1985)
Variant: In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher
Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author
2000s, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2004)
“The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war.”
Linus Pauling (1901–1994) American scientist
Nobel Lecture for The Nobel Peace Prize 1962 (11 December 1963).
1940s-1960s
“When the whole world is crazy, it doesn't pay to be sane.”
Terry Goodkind book The Pillars of Creation
Source: The Pillars of Creation
Ronald David Laing book The Divided Self
Source: The Divided Self (1960), Ch. 1 : The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons
Context: Existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person's experience of his world and himself. It is not so much an attempt to describe particular objects of his experience as to set all particular experiences within the context of his whole being-in-his-world. The mad things said and done by the schizophrenic will remain essentially a closed book if one does not understand their existential context. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world. Although retaining the terms schizoid and schizophrenic for the sane and psychotic positions respectively, I shall not, of course, be using these terms in their usual clinical psychiatric frame of reference, but phenomenologically and existentially.
Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer
Source: As quoted in "Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly" by Godfrey Smith in The New York Times (9 January 1966)
“God has not made a world which suits all; how shall a sane man expect to please all?”
John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 20
Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic
Book 3, Chapter 7 “The Irony of It” (p. 413)
The Elric Cycle, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976)