Great Quotes about the Insanity of Western Society

[Winston]

This quote in a book by Swiss Psychologist Erich Fromm is so true and describes people like us who don't fit in America, because we are too sane and honest in an insane and fake society. Isn't it so true, insightful and eloquent?

"The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic."
- Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)

[Winston]

Here is another great quote that Michael Tsarion mentions in his "Age of Manipulation" lecture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjquqioRmZE

"Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment."

Brilliant and so true! Our society never looks at itself. Instead, it looks for victims to target and scapegoat.

[Winston]

Here are great quotes from Frederich Nietzsche:

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Listen to Michael Tsarion explain the meaning of such quotes. It's really mind blowing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1OrxI8XzkE

[Winston]

I love this quote by Mark Twain. So true.

"In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."
- Autobiography of Mark Twain

[Winston]

Btw, have you ever thought that maybe the insane are actually seeing reality the way it is, while the "normal sane" in society are living and seeing an artificial reality which totally imprisons them and they don't know it, as if their mental perceptions were a tightly strung rubber band?

Scary huh?

[Winston]

The parable of the poisoned well

"There was once a wise king who ruled over a vast city. He was feared for his might and loved for his wisdom. Now in the heart of the city, there was a well whose waters were pure and crystalline from which the king and all the inhabitants drank. When all were asleep, an enemy entered the city and poured seven drops of a strange liquid into the well. And he said that henceforth all who drink this water shall become mad.

All the people drank of the water, but not the king. And the people began to say, "The king is mad and has lost his reason. Look how strangely he behaves. We cannot be ruled by a madman, so he must be dethroned."

The king grew very fearful, for his subjects were preparing to rise against him. So one evening, he ordered a golden goblet to be filled from the well, and he drank deeply. The next day, there was great rejoicing among the people, for their beloved king had finally regained his reason."

[Winston]

Check out these quotes I found and collected on insanity in an insane world that I'm going to add to my essays. They are so true huh?


Dogbert: "Reality is always controlled by the people who are most insane."
Scott Adams, Dilbert

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius

"We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal."
Carl Bernstein, U.S. journalist. Guardian (London, June 3, 1992)

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher."
Ambrose Bierce

"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage."
Ray Bradbury

"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you."
Rita Mae Brown

"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."
Johann von Goethe

"What luck for rulers that men do not think."
Adolf Hitler

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
Akiro Kurosawa

"Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world."
R. D. Lang

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
Ursula K. LeGuin (b. 1929), US author, "The Princess"

"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.... I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends ... and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it."
John Lennon, Interview BBC-TV (June 22, 1968)

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is apt to spread discontent among those who are."
H.L. Mencken

"In America, the criminally insane rule and the rest of us, or the vast majority of the rest of us, either do not care, do not know, or are distracted and properly brainwashed into acquiescence."
Kurt Nimmo

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"America is an insane asylum run by the inmates."
Lester Roloff (1914-1982)

"When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish-born British playwright

"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
Lily Tomlin (1939 - ), Actress

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
Voltaire

"A time will come when the whole world will go mad. And to anyone who is not mad they will say: 'You are mad, for you are not like us.'"
St. Anthony the Great (attributed to)

"Sometimes I think that the greatest sign that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe is that it hasn't tried to contact us yet."
Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes"

[Winston]

Some great quotes from Eric Fromm's book "Escape From Freedom":

"The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self."

"This loss of identity then makes it still more imperative to conform, it means that one can be sure of oneself only if one lives up to the expectations of others. If we do not live up to this picture, we not only risk disapproval and increased isolation, but we risk losing the identity of our personality, which means jeopardizing sanity."

"... We must replace manipulation of men by active and intelligent co-operation, and expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, from the formal political to the economic sphere."

[Winston]

[Wolfeye]

That Isaac Asimov one was good! Lily Tomlin's, too.

[Zambales]

Some signature material there. Especially like Lily Tomlin's.