Quotes: Insanity
Dogbert: Reality is always controlled by the people who are most insane.
Scott Adams, Dilbert
Dilbert to Dogbert: My invention will turn people into mindless sheep.
Dogbert to Dilbert: I’m curious how you’ll know it works. I assume it’s mostly a cosmetic change.
Scott Adams, Dilbert (c) 2002 United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
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
If we weren’t all crazy, we would go insane.
Jimmy Buffett, entertainer, lyrics in “Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes”
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Sir Winston Churchill
… we’re living in a Machiavellian world, whether we like it or we don’t.
Bob Dylan, songwriter, ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine, 22 Nov 2001, page 63, Dylan was not being cynical, he was praising Machiavelli
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Albert Einstein
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
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962)
What luck for rulers that men do not think.
Adolf Hitler
Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell.
Aldous Huxley
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), founder of analytical psychology
A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
Nikos Kazantzakis
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)
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
Sam Levenson
Years ago, it meant something to be crazy. Now everyone’s crazy.
Charles Manson
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
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
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
Stop the world. I want to get off.
Anthony Newly
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I must have ended up on the wrong planet. Everything here is so strange.
Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Norwegian poet
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity!
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), American poet
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
No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.
Lily Tomlin (1939 – ), Actress
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Lily Tomlin (1939 – ), Actress
Beam me up Scotty.
Star Trek
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simplify many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
Mark Twain, What Is Man?, Ed. Paul Baender (1973). Christian Science, bk. 1, ch. 5 (1907)
Earth is an insane asylum, to which the other planets deport their lunatics.
Voltaire, in Memnon the Philosopher
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)
The world is tragic to those who feel and comic to those who think.
Robert Walpole
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”
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
Frank Zappa
Quotes – Patriotic, Integrity (Part 1)
Quotes – Patriotic, Integrity (Part 2)
Quotes – Founding Fathers and Presidents