Insanity Quotations

Insanity, or madness, is a general term for a semi-permanent, severe mental disorder.

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All schizophrenia patients are mad, and none are sane. Their behaviour is incomprehensible. It tells us nothing about what they do in the rest of their lives, gives no insight into the human condition and has no lesson for sane people except how sane they are. There's nothing profound about it. Schizophrenics aren't clever or wise or witty — they may make some very odd remarks but that's because they're mad, and there's nothing to be got out of what they say. When they laugh at things the rest of us don't think are funny, like the death of a parent, they're not being penetrating, and on other occasions they're not wryly amused at at the simplicity and stupidity of the psychiatrist, however well justified that might be in many cases. They're laughing because they're mad, too mad to be able to tell what's funny any more. The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what's funny is one of them. And that's an end of the matter.
- Kingsley Amis, Stanley and the Women, p. 147

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
- Transactions of the … North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Volume 71 (Wildlife Management Institute, 1975), p. 54 (attributed to Albert Einstein).

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
- Rita Mae Brown, Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983), p. 68 (attributed to Jane Fulton).
- This and variations on it have also been variously attributed to Benjamin Franklin and an old Chinese proverb.

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

Madness is like the Emergency Exit.You can just step outside and close the Door on all those Bad Things that happened.You can lock Them all away Forever
- The Joker The Killing Joke

Madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push.
- The Joker The Dark Knight

An egoist can be won over by being respected, a crazy person can be won over by allowing him to behave in an insane manner and a wise person can be won over by truth.
- Chanakya

GP: Maybe you are just crazy.
M2: Indeed! But do not reject these teachings as false because I am crazy. The reason that I am crazy is because they are true.
- Principia Discordia

I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.
- Hunter S. Thompson

If we are all insane, then all insanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (except neither of those two amateur-night surgeons were ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you're under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business...although it's doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties."
- Stephen King, Danse Macabre (1981)

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.
- Fahrenheit 451

I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff— I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.
- J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

In women, courage is often mistaken for insanity.
- Doctor in Iron Jawed Angels

...in the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them.
- Lin Yutang

It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.
- Henry Kissinger, in a statement at a National Security Council meeting in 1975.

Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
- H. L. Mencken

The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'
- Robert G. Ingersoll

The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.
- Salvador Dalí

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm mad but not ill.
- Robert Anton Wilson

You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.
- Charles Manson

To clear the mind of its noise then to lose the mind altogether. This is meditation. (Of course some would call this insanity.)
- Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D.

You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.
- Robin Williams

There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
- Oscar Levant

One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. "The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis."
- Philip K. Dick

Quoternity