Madness and sanity - Quotes from Science Fiction
| 21.02.2012, 21:37 | |
A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories. Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking! Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence - whether much that is glorious - whether all that is profound - does not spring from disease of thought - from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. - Edgar Allan Poe, ''Eleanora'' (1841) Everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential. - Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972) The whole world is mad just now, and if you want help you must come to a madman to get it. - Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, Dracula (play, 1927) It is the normal lot of people who must live this life [in space] to be - by terrestrial standards - insane. Insanity under such conditions is a useful and logical defense mechanism, an invaluable and salutary retreat from reality. - Charles L. Harness, The Paradox Men (1949) In an asylum, the only lunatic is the psychologist. - Charles L. Harness, The Paradox Men (1949) I rather pride myself on the way I manage hysteria. - Doris Pitkin Buck, ''Two-Bit Oracle'' (1954) The mind was a tricky mechanism after all - it could break down when you least expected it. - Richard Matheson, ''The Curious Child'' (1954) He saw Eternity with great clarity as a sink of deepening psychoses, a writhing pit of abnormal motivation, a mass of desperate lives torn brutally out of context. - Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity (1955) Insanity, gentlemen, is not a catchall for every human action that involves motives we don't understand. Insanity has its own structure, its own internal logic. - Stanislaw Lem, The Investigation (1959), translated by Adele Milch (1974) His own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance. - J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962) Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. - Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962) There's nothing more potentially explosive than a society in which psychotics dominate, define the values, control the means of communication. - Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) Merely knowing that you are mentally sick won't make you well, any more than knowing you have a heart condition provides a suddenly sound heart. - Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) People talk about mental illness as an escape! He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death. - Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip (1964) If you can keep your head whilst all around are losing theirs, maybe you haven't grasped the true facts of the event. - John T. Phillifent, ''Flying Fish'' (1964) There was a madness to it all, but perhaps it was a divine madness. And is not that madness that which sustains man in his terrible self-knowledge, the driving madness which demands reason of a casual universe, the awful aloneness which seeks among the stars for companionship. - James Gunn, ''The Listeners'' (1968) Crazy - a nonscientific term meaning that the person to whom one applies that label has a world picture differing from the accepted one. - Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973) What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. - Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Diary of the Rose'' (1976) If I were a madwoman, then everything would end well. From insanity, as from a dream, one could free oneself - in both cases there was hope. - Stanislaw Lem, ''The Mask'' (1976), translated by Michael Kandel (1977) Would it save you all this bother if I just gave up and went mad now? - Douglas Adams, ''Fit the Third,'' episode of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series, 1978) The asylum is the haven of mental health - the place of cure, where the anxious gain peace, where the weak gain strength, where the prisoners of inadequate reality assessment win their way to freedom! - Ursula K. Le Guin, ''SQ'' (1978) The mad are sane! - Nigel Kneale, Quatermass (TV miniseries, 1979) [On humans:] Yes, they are mad. But there is splendor in such madness. - John Morressy, ''The Empath and the Savages'' (1979) One of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. - Philip K. Dick, Valis (1981) 1) Those who agree with you are insane. 2) Those who do not agree with you are in power. - Philip K. Dick, Valis (1981) Not like Armitage's madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite direction, reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like breaking a length of wire. - William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) The basis of psychosis, in a nutshell, is the chronic inability to see the easy way out. All the behavior, all that constitutes psychotic activity and the psychotic lifestyle, stems from this perceptual flaw. - Philip K. Dick, ''Strange Memories of Death'' (1985) Maybe we all secretly will everything that happens to us. In that case, does the psychotic person will his own ultimate kinetic death, his own dead end path? Does he play to lose? - Philip K. Dick, ''Strange Memories of Death'' (1985) Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes. - Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986) The Deftmenes are mad and the Dumii are sane, thought Snibril, and that's just the same as being mad except that it's quieter. - Terry Pratchett, The Carpet People, revised (1992) Believing oneself to be perfect is often the sign of a delusional mind. - Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, Star Trek: First Contact (film, 1996) | |
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