In the Puranas it was predicted that toward the end of Kali Yuga humanity would be driven to acts of madness. It is very dangerous that people do not recognize this state...But how do you explain to people that their leaders and their teachers are insane? ~Agni Yoga, Supermundane, (1938)
In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses.... Insanity, for instance, which...was so terribly common a product of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared, with its alternative, suicide.
~Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward...
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage. ~ Ray Bradbury
To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Insanity, craziness, or madness, is a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity may manifest in people as violations of societal norms, including becoming a danger to themselves and others, though not all such acts are considered insanity. In modern usage insanity is most commonly encountered as an informal unscientific term denoting mental instability, or in the narrow legal context of the insanity defense.

Quotes

A

  • Have I need of mad men, that ye have brought this fellow to play the mad man in my presence?
    • Achish king of Gath, Bible, Samuel I, 21:15.
  • In the Puranas it was predicted that toward the end of Kali Yuga humanity would be driven to acts of madness. It is very dangerous that people do not recognize this state, for while it is possible to cure a patient who does not resist treatment, if he struggles against it the beneficial effects of the medicine will be diminished. But how do you explain to people that their leaders and their teachers are insane? ...such mental confusion fully corresponds with the end of Kali Yuga... Most people hate the messenger who brings knowledge... let them at least remember the warning that humanity is acting insanely. The Thinker warned, “Do not fall into madness.”
  • 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.

B

  • In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The... burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of all is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is never excessive; care for one's self and one's family, anxiety as to livelihood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life—all these influences, which once did so much to wreck the minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more. Certainly, an improvement of the species ought to follow such a change.
    Insanity, for instance, which in the nineteenth century was so terribly common a product of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared, with its alternative, suicide.
  • 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.
  • Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.
  • 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.
  • Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
    • Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in United States Congress, House (1973), Energy reorganization act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, first session, on H.R. 11510. p. 248

C

  • Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves - and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and we shall find ways to put an end to them.
  • The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.
  • The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.
  • It is ambivalence. Because I think that they’re heroic even when they’re crazed. I think that being crazed and obsessed is part of being heroic. You don’t get one without the other. Ambition is something else. It’s not ambition in the material sense. My characters are obsessed with discovery and that does excite me and I do identify with that. A good creative scientist is as good as a good creative artist.

D

  • I don't withdraw a word of my initial statement. But I do now think it may have been incomplete. There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under "insane" but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed. Sincere people who are not ignorant, not stupid, and not wicked can be cruelly torn, almost in two, between the massive evidence of science on the one hand, and their understanding of what their holy book tells them on the other. I think this is one of the truly bad things religion can do to a human mind. There is wickedness here, but it is the wickedness of the institution and what it does to a believing victim, not wickedness on the part of the victim himself.
    • Richard Dawkins "Ignorance Is No Crime", Free Inquiry 21 (3), Summer 2001, ISSN 0272-0701
    • Regarding his 1989 statement "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."
  • Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.
  • Great wits are sure to madness near alli'd.

E

  • I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me —
Because, if there isn’t then there’s something wrong,
Or at least, very different from what it seemed to be,
With the world itself—and that’s much more frightening!
  • We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting—as indeed he could not help doing—for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain dealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” Essays: First Series, Complete Works (1883), vol. 2, pp. 194-195

F

  • You are right, Mr. Bond.
    That is just what I am, a maniac.
    All the greatest men are maniacs.
    They are possessed by a mania that drives them towards their goal.
    The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders — all maniacs.
  • The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.
  • Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of ‘unadjusted’ individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.

H

  • The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer’s voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.
    • Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf, B. Creighton, trans., (New York: 1990), pp. 58-59
  • Hitler went on to cite “as examples . . . cases in which the mentally ill could only be bedded on sand or sawdust because they continually befouled themselves,” and in which “patients put their own excrement into their mouths, eating it and so on.” Hitler pointed out that in this way “a certain saving in hospitals, doctors, and nursing personnel could be brought about.”
  • Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind over tasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
  • The days of visitation are come, the days of recompence are come; Israel shall know it: the prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad.

K

  • 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.
  • Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain.
  • Ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.

L

  • A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university … This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
  • For many years he has not breathed the air,
    The wholesome open air ; the sun, the moon,
    The stars, the clouds, the fair blue heaven, the spring,
    The flowers, the trees, and the sweet face of man,
    Song, or words yet more musical than song,
    Affections, feelings, social intercourse
    (Unless remembered in his fairy dreams)
    Have all been strangers to his solitude ! —
    A curse is set on him, like poverty,
    Or leprosy, or the red plague, but worse, —
    The heart has sent its fire up to the brain,
    And he is mad.
    • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The London Literary Gazette (5th April 1823), POETICAL CATALOGUE OF PICTURES. - 'A Maniac visited by his Family in confinement : by Davis.'
  • You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior.
  • There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
    • Oscar Levant, as quoted in Celebrity Register : An Irreverent Compendium of American Quotable Notables (1959) by Cleveland Amory ; also paraphrased as "There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line".
  • It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre 'kick', Here is the material for a really profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination....The very pre-ponderance of passionately pious men in the colony was virtually an assurance of unnatural crime; insomuch as psychology now proves the religious instinct to be a form of transmuted eroticism precisely parallel to the transmutations in other directions which respectively produce such things as sadism, hallucination, melancholia, and other mental morbidities. Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity. This was aggravated, of course, by the Puritan policy of rigorously suppressing all the natural outlets of excuberant feeling--music, laughter, colour, pageantry, and so on. To observe Christmas Day was once a prison offence....
  • The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

M

  • Madness and insanity are two terms that are so vague and relative that you can’t really apportion proper values to them. The only thing I can think of that has any use it functional and dysfunctional. Are you working as well? In which case, it doesn’t matter if you are mad.

P

  • Für mich ist die Vorstellung untragbar, dass beste, blühende Jugend an der Front ihr Leben lassen muss, damit verblichene Asoziale und unverantwortliche Antisoziale ein gesichertes Dasein haben.
    • It is unbearable to me that the flower of our youth must lose their lives at the front, while that feeble-minded and asocial element can have a secure existence in the asylum.
    • Hermann Pfannmüller; as quoted in Baader, Gerhard (2009). "Psychiatrie im Nationalsozialismus zwischen ökonomischer Rationalität und Patientenmord [Psychiatry in National Socialism: Between Economic Rationality and Patient Murder]" (PDF). Geschichte der Psychiatrie: Nationalsocialismus und Holocaust Gedächtnis und Gegenwart (PDF). geschichtederpsychiatrie.at. Retrieved 12 March 2017. pp. 18–27.
  • I was feeling like mad
    by the melody of birds
    singing out of tune
    in the settlements
    where travels lose
    their own destinations.
  • Without asking anybody’s advice
    I turned myself insane.
  • In how many minds
    should I go crazy?
    whom should I ask?

Q

R

  • In the Puranas it was predicted that toward the end of Kali Yuga humanity would be driven to acts of madness. It is very dangerous that people do not recognize this state, for while it is possible to cure a patient who does not resist treatment, if he struggles against it the beneficial effects of the medicine will be diminished. But how do you explain to people that their leaders and their teachers are insane? ...such mental confusion fully corresponds with the end of Kali Yuga... Most people hate the messenger who brings knowledge... let them at least remember the warning that humanity is acting insanely. The Thinker warned, “Do not fall into madness.”

S

  • 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.
  • There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
    • Seneca, On Tranquility of the Mind.
  • Though this be madness, yet there is a method in’t

T

  • Only people who are in a deeply negative state, who feel very bad indeed, would create such a reality as a reflection of how they feel. Now they are engaged in destroying nature and the planet that sustains them. Unbelievable but true. Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That's not a judgment. Ifs a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are available right now.
  • See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always non-acceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
  • Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet.
  • If it weren't for alcohol, tranquilizers, antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are all consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind would become even more glaringly obvious than it is already. I believe that, if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the population would become a danger to themselves and others. These drugs, of course, simply keep you stuck in dysfunction. Their widespread use only delays the breakdown of the old mind structures and the emergence of higher consciousness. While individual users may get some relief from the daily torture inflicted on them by their minds, they are prevented from generating enough conscious presence to rise above thought and so find true liberation.
  • Open your eyes and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the planet. You don't need to condemn. Just observe. That is sin. That is insanity.
  • Until now, human intelligence, which is no more than a minute aspect of universal intelligence, has been distorted and misused by the ego. I call that “intelligence in the service of madness.” Splitting the atom requires great intelligence. Using that intelligence for building and stockpiling atom bombs is insane or at best extremely unintelligent. Stupidity is relatively harmless, but intelligent stupidity is highly dangerous. This intelligent stupidity, for which one could find countless obvious examples, is threatening our survival as a species.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005)

W

  • We might liken the 'two selves' to Laurel and Hardy. Ollie is the objective mind, 'you'. Stan is the subjective mind, the 'hidden you'. But Stan happens to be in control of your energy supply. So if you wake up feeling low and discouraged, you (Ollie) tend to transmit your depression to Stan, who fails to send you energy, which makes you feel lower than ever. This vicious circle is the real cause of most mental illness.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 396-97.
  • Like men condemned to thunderbolts,
    Who, ere the blow, become mere dolts.
  • Much madness is divinest sense
    To a discerning eye;
    Much sense the starkest madness.
    'Tis the majority
    In this, as all, prevails
    Assent, and you are sane;
    Demur,—you're straightway dangerous,
    And handled with a chain.
  • For those whom God to ruin has designed
    He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.
    • John Dryden, Fables, The Hind and the Panther (1687), Part III, line 2,387.
  • There is a pleasure, sure,
    In being mad, which none but madmen know!
  • The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.
  • At dæmon, homini quum struit aliquid malum,
    Pervertit illi primitus mentem suam.
    • But the devil when he purports any evil against man, first perverts his mind.
    • Euripides, fragment 25. Barnes Ed. Attributed to Athenagorus. Also ed. pub. at Padua, 1743–53, Volume X, p. 268. The Translator. P. Carmeli, gives the Italian as: Quondo vogliono gli Dei far perire alcuno, gli tiglie la mente.
  • But when Fate destines one to ruin it begins by blinding the eyes of his understanding.
    • James Fraser, Short History of the Hindostan Emperors of the Moghol Race (1742), p. 57. See also story of the Christian Broker. Arabian Nights. Lane's translation. Ed. 1859, Volume I, p. 307.
  • Mad as a March hare.
    • James Halliwell-Phillipps, Archaic Diet, Volume II. Art. "March Hare." Heywood—Proverbs, Part II, Chapter V. Skelton—Replycacion Agaynst Certayne Yong Scolers, etc, line 35.
  • Doceo insanire omnes.
    • I teach that all men are mad.
    • Horace, Satires, II. 3. 81.
  • Nimirum insanus paucis videatur, eo quod
    Maxima pars hominum morbo jactatur eodem.
    • He appears mad indeed but to a few, because the majority is infected with the same disease.
    • Horace, Satires, II. �. 120.
  • Quisnam igitur sanus? Qui non stultus.
    • Who then is sane? He who is not a fool.
    • Horace, Satires, II. 3. 158.
  • O major tandem parcas, insane, minori.
    • Oh! thou who art greatly mad, deign to spare me who am less mad.
    • Horace, Satires, II. 3. 326.
  • I demens! et sævas curre per Alpes,
    Ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias.
    • Go, madman! rush over the wildest Alps, that you may please children and be made the subject of declamation.
    • Juvenal, Satires, X, 166.
  • O, hark! what mean those yells and cries?
    His chain some furious madman breaks;
    He comes—I see his glaring eyes;
    Now, now, my dungeon grate he shakes.
    Help! Help! He's gone!—O fearful woe,
    Such screams to hear, such sights to see!
    My brain, my brain,—I know, I know
    I am not mad but soon shall be.
    • Matthew Gregory Lewis ("Monk Lewis"), The Maniac.
  • Id commune malum; semel insanivimus omnes.
    • It is a common calamity; at some one time we have all been mad.
    • Baptista Mantuanus, Eclogue I.
  • It’s a jungle out there
    Poison in the very air we breathe
    Do you know what’s in the water that you drink?
    Well I do, and it’s amazing
    People think I’m crazy, ’cause I worry all the time
    If you paid attention, you’d be worried too
    You better pay attention
    Or this world we love so much might just kill you
    I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so!
  • My dear Sir, take any road, you can't go amiss. The whole state is one vast insane asylum.
    • James L. Petigru, on being asked the way to the Charleston, South Carolina Insane Asylum (1860).
  • Hei mihi, insanire me ajunt, ultro cum ipsi insaniunt.
    • They call me mad, while they are all mad themselves.
    • Plautus, Menæchmi, V, 2, 90.
  • Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiæ fuit.
    • There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness.
    • Seneca, De Animi Tranquillitate, XV. 10.
  • Quid est dementius quam bilem in homines collectam in res effundere.
    • What is more insane than to vent on senseless things the anger that is felt towards men?
    • Seneca, De Ira, II. 26.
  • Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
    That he is mad, 'tis true, 'tis true 'tis pity;
    And pity 'tis 'tis true.
  • It shall be so:
    Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.
  • I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
    For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.
  • We are not ourselves
    When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
    To suffer with the body.
  • Were such things here as we do speak about?
    Or have we eaten on the insane root
    That takes the reason prisoner?
  • Quem Jupiter vult perdere, dementat primus.
    • Whom Jupiter would destroy he first drives mad.
    • Sophocles, Antigone, Johnson's ed. (1758), line 632. Sophocles quotes it as a saying. The passage in Antigone is explained by Tricinius as "The gods lead to error him whom they intend to make miserable." Quoted by Athenagoras in Legat, p. 106. Oxon Ed. Found in a fragment of Æschylus preserved by Plutarch—De Audiend. Poet, p. 63. Oxon ed. See also Constantinus Manasses. Fragments, Book VIII, line 40. Ed. by Boissonade. (1819). Duport's Gnomologia Homerica, p. 282. (1660). Oracula Sibylliana, Book VIII, line 14. Leutsch and Schneidewin—Corpus Paræmiographorum Græcorum, Volume I, p. 444. Sextus Empiricus is given as the first writer to present the whole of the adage as cited by Plutarch. ("Concerning such whom God is slow to punish.") Hesiod—Scutum Herculis. V. 89. Note by Robinson gives it to Plato. See also Stobæus—Germ, II. de Malitia.
  • Insanus omnis furere credit ceteros.
    • Every madman thinks all other men mad.
    • Syrus, Maxims.
  • A human creature deprived of reason, and disordered in his senses, is still an animal, or instrument possessing strength and ability to commit violence; but he is no more so than a mere mechanical machine, which, when put in motion, performs its powerful operations on all that comes in its way, without consciousness of its own effects, or responsibility for them. In like manner, the man under the influence of real madness, has properly no will, but does what he is not conscious or; sensible he is doing, and therefore cannot be made answerable for any consequences.
    • Lord Eskgrove, Kinloch's Case (1795), 55 How. St. Tr. 1000; reported in The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 105.
  • Hamlet, being charged with " coinage of the brain" answers:
    "It is not madness
    That I have uttered; bring me to the test,
    And I the matter will re-word; which madness
    Would gambol from."
    Madness, then, varies and fluctuates: it cannot "re-word"—if the poet's observation be well founded; and though the Court would not at all rely upon it as an authority, yet it knows from the information of a most eminent physician that this test of madness, suggested by this passage, was found, by experiment in a recent case, to be strictly applicable, and discovered the lurking disease.
    • Sir John Nicholl, Groom v. Thomas (1829), 2 Hagg. Ecc. Rep. 452, 453; reported in The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 104-05. The reference goes on to say:
      The Court was understood to allude to the case referred to in a note to p. 242, of the 10th number of the new series of the Quarterly Journal of Sciences and the Arts, London, 1829. "If the tests of insanity are matters of law, the practice of allowing experts to testify what they are should be discontinued; if they are matters of fact, the Judge should no longer testify without being sworn as a witness and showing himself qualified to testify as an expert."—Doe, J., State v. Pike, 49 New Hamp. Eep. 399 ; 6 Amer. Eep. 584.
  • The Royal College has taken a very dubious function of intervening into the inner affairs of national psychiatric associations and using mentally-ill patients for political purposes. I sincerely hope that none of the members… seriously believes that in the Soviet Union mentally-healthy people could be forcibly put into mental hospitals.
    • Andrei Snezhnevsky as quoted by Bloch, Sidney; Reddaway, Peter (1977). Russia's political hospitals: The abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.
  • Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts? [...] Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity.
    • Mark Twain, "A New Crime" (1870), as reprinted in Essays and Sketches of Mark Twain (1995), ed. Stuart Miller, ISBN 1566198798
  • Mad Hatter: You are trying to understand madness with logic. This is not unlike searching for darkness with a torch.
    • Brian K. Vaughan, Detective Comics Vol 1 #787
  • When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
  • Because the insanity defense is a key part of our criminal-justice system, which is founded on the belief that people normally choose whether or not to obey the law. Certain people, we have said historically, cannot make that choice, however, either because they are too young or because of severe mental retardation or mental illness. The insanity defense exists in practically every civilized country. It is not some kind of aberration, as some seem to be suggesting in the wake of the Hinckley verdict.
    • Elyce Zenoff Ferster, answering an interview question in U.S. News & World Report, Volume 93 (1982), p. 15; reported in Alan F. Pater, Jason R. Pater, What They Said in 1982: The Yearbook of World Opinion (1983).

See also

This article is issued from Wikiquote. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.