Madness And Civilization Quotes

Dramatic uprising of stupidity can start from nowhere and only be seen when it reaches it's climax. ~ Auliq Ice

I'm struck by the difficulty I had in formulating it. When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about in Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic, but power? Yet I'm perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never had such a field of analyses at my disposal. I can say that this was an incapacity linked undoubtedly with the political situation in which we found ourselves. It is hard to see where, either on the Right or the Left, this problem of power could then have been posed. On the Right, it was posed only in terms of constitution, sovereignty, and so on, that is, in juridical terms; on the Marxist side, it was posed only in terms of the state apparatus. The way power was exercised - concretely, and in detail - with its specificity, its techniques and tactics, was something no one attempted to ascertain; they contented themselves with denouncing it in a polemical and global fashion as it existed among the "other," in the adversary camp. Where Soviet socialist power was in question, its opponents called it totalitarianism; power in Western capitalism was denounced by the Marxists as class domination; but the mechanics of power in themselves were never analyzed. ~ Michel Foucault

Be as intellectual as you like about it, but India is brilliantly mad. And if you want to love it, you have to hate it first. ~ Simon Dring

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness ~ Michel Foucault

To respect madness is not to interpret it as the involuntary and inevitable accident of disease, but to recognise this lower limit of human truth, a limit not accidental but essential. ~ Foucault, Michel

The chaos, the organized, instrumental fear and pestilence was everywhere, and still he was in love with his existence. In. Love. With the whole mad mess, the goldenness, the ripening young psyche of the world. ~ Laurie Perez

If God were to exist for the entire humanity, he would be profoundly vile, as he allows the existence of unfathomable sin, stupidity, madness, and misery for no reason than his own despicable enjoyment. God exists though, not for all humanity, but for a one chosen man - a philosopher - who is bound to answer the greatest philosophical question, the question about the nature of the questioner's existence, which progressively quenches the divine vanity. ~ Kedar Joshi

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior. ~ Robert Bringhurst

We're multiplying our capabilities as a civilization and yet we still accept the notion that important societal progress, like combating inequality and crime - or even innovating in government and medicine - must take generations. ~ Shane Snow

Indeed, taxation and other forms of aggression-through-government are so taken for granted in our culture that one of our most popular sayings is that "nothing is certain except death and taxes." Yet slavery was once as universal. Taxation is thought to be indispensable to civilization today, just as slavery once was. Advocates of taxation claim that since most people pay assigned taxes before the guns show up, they have implicitly agreed to it as the price of living in "society." Most slaves obeyed their master before he got out the whip, yet we would hardly argue that this constituted agreement to their servitude. Today, we have an enlightened perspective on slavery, just as one day we will have an enlightened perspective on taxes and other forms of aggression we now think of as "the only way. ~ Mary J. Ruwart

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master. ~ Henry James

By now it's March, and it's too late to start another new year's resolution: you'll simply have to wait until December 31st again. Everybody knows you can't start something new in March. That would be ridiculous. Similar to starting a diet on a Thursday. Madness. (All diets start on a Monday, as on the Thursday before you start you have to eat everything out of your fridge and cupboards for the following Monday. It's a marvellous system.) ~ Miranda Hart

Look, isn't there any way you can just stamp me as not crazy and let me get outta here. ~ Kyle Chandler

People are hurt and afraid at a subtle psychological level - and are therefore self-absorbed, incapable of taking on larger perspectives and incapable of acting upon the very real long-term risks that threatening our global civilization. We must, at all cost, make the world population much, much happier in the deepest sense of the word. ~ Hanzi Freinacht

Who can describe the injustice and the cruelties that in the course of centuries the peoples of color of the world have suffered at the hands of Europeans? ... We and our civilization are burdened, really, with a great debt. We are not free to confer benefits on these men, or not, as we please; it is our duty. Anything we give them is not benevolence but atonement. ~ Albert Schweitzer

We could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, Cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche's preposterous mustache which instills great anguish and skepticism in the brain, which leads (as it did in his case) to utter madness. I suggest we go to Paris instead. ~ Maira Kalman

These three creation stories were shaped in the patriarchal, slave-holding world of early urban civilization in the eastern Mediterranean of the second and first millennia M.C.E. In the Babylonian story that urban world is still new and precarious. Another world, not under male/human control, stands as the earlier beginning, ruled by a huge theriomorphic Great Mother, who gestated all things, gods and cosmic beings, in the mingled waters of her womb. The story mandates her dethronement, and with it a demotion of the female from primal power to secondary consort.
Slavery is a central institution mandated by this story. ~ Rosemary Radford Ruether

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe. ~ Simone Weil

The two halves of my barely whole being rioted, chained in place and snarling in protest of the other's presence. The bondage allowed them just close enough to drive each other to venomous rebellion, yet never permitting the chance to make contact; to fight. There would be no battle, no resolution. The end result sounded more and more like insanity. So this is love? It truly is mad ... ~ Aubrea Summer

It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din. ~ Herbert Read

We'd all be a heap sight better off if we'd forget the highfalutin notions of our fancy civilization and mind more what the savages knew long before us: to honor our mother. ~ Anonymous

The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies ... ~ Thomas Hardy

We shall see that the problems we have to face concern the possible influence of Babylon, rather than of Egypt, upon Hebrew tradition. And one last example, drawn from the later period, will serve to demonstrate how Babylonian influence penetrated the ancient world and has even left some trace upon modern civilization. It is a fact, though one perhaps not generally realized, that the twelve divisions on the dials of our clocks and watches have a Babylonian, and ultimately a Sumerian, ancestry. For why is it we divide the day into twenty-four hours? We have a decimal system of reckoning, we count by tens; why then should we divide the day and night into twelve hours each, instead of into ten or some multiple of ten? The reason is that the Babylonians divided the day into twelve double-hours; and the Greeks took over their ancient system of time-division along with their knowledge of astronomy and passed it on to us. ~ Leonard W. King

Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse. ~ Saul Bellow

Tarantulas have also received a lot of
bad press in the movies. Many movies
and television programs starring such
noted actors as Sean Connery, The
Three Stooges, Harrison Ford, and
William Shatner, have featured tarantulas
as dangerous to humans or menaces to
civilization. The Tarantula That Ate Tokyo
is a long-standing joke among horrormovie buffs. The fact is that these
movies play with the ignorance and fears
passed on for generations by unenlightened people. Nobody would pay to see
the movie The Beagle That Ate Boston
since everybody knows what a beagle
really is. Few know tarantulas as well. ~ Stanley A Schultz

And moody madness laughing wild Amid severest woe. ~ Thomas Gray

All right, so there he is, our representative to the world, Mr. Western Civilization, in codpiece and pantyhose up there on the boards, firing away at the rapt groundlings with his blank verses, not less of a word-slinger and spellbinder than the Bard himself and therefore not to be considered too curiously on such matters as relevance, coherence, consistency, propriety, sanity, common decency. ~ Marvin Mudrick

But isn't the whole idea of sanctification the fact that we're not really there yet? That we're still growing and becoming? Still learning how to live the gospel out? Then why this obsession with pretending to be something for other people, who are pretending to be something for us? It's madness. You see that, don't you? The cross of Jesus, while definitely meant to include us in the family of God, is also designed to out us as people who desperately need what its forgiveness and power provide. The ~ Matt Chandler

In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her. ~ Nancy Willard

Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to imagine possibilities and then turn those possibilities into realities. Evident in the gifts of civilization - in our arts, languages, sciences, technologies, businesses, governments, and so on - it is clear that we are a profoundly creative species. Yet many of us only access a smidgen of our creativity. ~ Scott Edmund Miller

In every life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says: what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference is how that knowledge changes them. In most cases, it is simply a case of burying that knowledge and pretending it isn't there. That is how humans grow old. That is ultimately what creases their faces and curves their backs and shrinks their mouths and ambitions. The weight of that denial. The stress of it. This is not unique to humans. The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change. ~ Matt Haig

Ah, those were the days ... The Dark-Hunters hunted us, we slaughtered them. We made our homes in underground catacombs and crypts where the Hunters couldn't go without getting possessed. It was an interesting time to be Apollite or Daimon. But that was before we discovered civilization and modern conveniences. Before the human world developed enough to where we could exist at night under the pretense of being one of them. Apollites owning businesses and houses. Daimons playing Nintendo. What is this world coming to? (Thanatos) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Champagne is the wine of civilization and the oil of government. ~ Winston Churchill

Is diversity our strength? Or anybody's strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan's homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity - or does the very word "Balkanization" remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times? Has Europe become a safer place after importing vast numbers of people from the Middle East, with cultures hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization? ~ Thomas Sowell

Doubt ... is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness. ~ Gustave Flaubert

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather
than
an asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form
we are justified in supposing
that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the
unit, stiff and sharp,
conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and
liking for everything
self-dependent, anything an

ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to
attempt through sheer
reserve, to confuse presumptions resulting from
observation, is idle. You cannot make us
think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are
brilliant, it
is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing
of pre-eminence. Would you not, minus
thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere
perculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, the
elements, or mildew;
but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance
without co-ordination? Guarding the
infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-
membered too violently,
your thorns are the best part of you. ~ Marianne Moore

Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama. ~ George Pierce Baker

Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell. ~ Pietro Aretino

During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began. ~ Tom Standage

On one side, the forces of destruction, the forces of the desert, have risen, and on the other hand stand firm the forces of civilization, but we will not be stopped. ~ Chaim Weizmann

It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour. ~ Louis Sullivan

Racing and hunting excite man's heart to madness. ~ Laozi

The most important acts of a civilization, be they atrocities against life or acts of compassion beyond understanding, are always done in the name of the greater good. And no one who acts in the name of the greater good believes they are wrong. That is why right and wrong are so often indistinguishable. ~ Steve Karmazenuk

For indeed, what is more dire than the evils which today afflict the world? What is more terrible for the discerning than the unfolding events? What is more pitiable and frightening for those who endure them? To see a barbarous people of the desert overrunning another's lands as though they were their own; to see civilization itself being ravaged by wild and untamed beasts whose form alone is human. ~ Maximus The Confessor

They ask themselves: "What will he do?" "How will he react?" "Will he go mad?" "Will he bite?" "Will he be armed?" They're pumped up with fear. Adrenaline pumping, fingers tense on the trigger, brains racing. And I'm cool as a cat! The name 'Charles Bronson' causes panic! The name 'Mickey Peterson' causes stress! The police all love to arrest me, as I'm the most exciting madman they will ever arrest! It's a fact. So here I am years later, and I'm still the madman. There is no escaping my past. ~ Stephen Richards

Gregori's silver eyes moved over both women, then settled on Shea. "The child must be protected. It is no use appealing to Raven for logic, as she has none, and Mikhail is so besotted with her that he does not see his first duty, so it is up to you. For the sake of all of us, you must protect this child. Do you understand?"
She felt ensnared by those molten eyes. She might not fully comprehend his reasons, but she felt his genuine urgency. She nodded. "I'll watch over her, healer."
"It is not for my sake only, but for humans and Carpathians alike. This child must live, Shea," he reiterated. "She must."
She felt clearly the warning, the plea from his otherwise damned soul. This child was his only hope.
"Gregori," Mikhail reminded him softly, "if the child is your lifemate, and you do something careless, you are condemning her to death. Keep that in mind when you enter this place of madness."
Gregori's eyes flashed at his old friend. "Do you think I would chance harming her in any way? I have waited several lifetimes for her. These humans are nothing. They have persecuted our people for far too long. I mean it to stop."
Mikhail nodded, his dark eyes, so like his brother's, black ice. "You are up to this, Jacques?"
Jacques' smile was a humorless promis of retaliation. "Have no worries about me. I am looking forward to this."
Mikhail sighed. "Two bloodthirsty savages thinking they are in the dark ages."
Jacques exchanged a humorless gr ~ Christine Feehan

On a street of right and wrong in every inch of sadness, rocks and tanks go hand in hand with madness. ~ Elton John