Academics From Scotland

"It is not, perhaps, unreasonable to conclude, that a pure and perfect democracy is a thing not attainable by man, constituted as he is of contending elements of vice and virtue, and ever mainly influenced by the predominant principle of self-interest. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted, that there never was that government called a republic, which was not ultimately ruled by a single will, and, therefore, (however bold may seem the paradox,) virtually and substantially a monarchy."

"I. ... the Translation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work. II. ... the style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of the original. III. ... the Translation should have all the ease of original composition."

"But if authors, even of taste and genius, be found at times to have made an injudicious use of that liberty which is allowed in the translation of poetry, we must expect to see it miserably abused indeed, where those talents are evidently wanting."

"Next in importance to a faithful transfusion of the sense and meaning of an author, is an assimilation of the style and manner of writing in the translation to that of the original."

"In Latin two negatives make an affirmative; but it is otherwise in Greek, they only give force to the negation ..."

"O if thou knew’st how thou thyself dost harm, And dost prejudge thy bliss, and spoil my rest; Then thou would’st melt the ice out of thy breast And thy relenting heart would kindly warm."

"The weaker sex, to piety more prone"

"Death is the port where all may refuge find, The end of labour, entry unto rest."

"What life refused, to gain by death he thought: For life and death are but indifferent things, And of themselves not to be shunned nor sought, But for the good or ill that either brings."

"What thing so good which not some harm may bring? Even to be happy is a dangerous thing."

"That fatal sergeant, Death, spares no degree."

"Words but direct, example must allure."

"The world's chief idol, nurse of fretting cares, Dumb trafficker, yet understood o'er all."

"Vile avarice and pride, from Heaven accurst, In all are ill, but in a church-man worst."

"That generous plainness proves the better way."

"Lo, one who loved true honour more than fame, A real goodness, not a studied name."

"Despair and confidence both banish fear."

"Of all things that are feared, the least is death."

"When policy puts on religious cloak."

"Pride hated stands, and doth unpitied fall."

"Though I was long in coming to the light, Yet may I mount to fortune's highest height."

"I hope, I fear, resolved, and yet I doubt, I'm cold as ice, and yet I burn as fire; I wot not what, and yet I much desire, And trembling too, am desperately stout."

"I sing the sabbath of eternal rest."

"His birthright sold, some pottage so to gain."

"Although my hap be hard, my heart is high."

"Of all the tyrants that the world affords, Our own affections are the fiercest lords."

"To love and be beloved, this is the good, Which for most sovereign all the world will prove."

"Times daily change and we likewise in them; Things out of sight do straight forgotten die."

"That queen of nations, absolutely great."

"My name is Norval; on the Grampian hills My father feeds his flocks; a frugal swain, Whose constant cares were to increase his store, And keep his only son, myself, at home."

"I'll woo her as the lion wooes his brides."

"A rude and boisterous captain of the sea."

"Like Douglas conquer, or like Douglas die."

"In the first days Of my distracting grief, I found myself As women wish to be who love their lords."

"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."

"I exhort all People, gentle and simple, men, women and children, to buy, to read, to extol, these labours of mine. Let them not fear to defend every article; for I will bear them harmless. I have arguments good store, and can easily confute, either logically, theologically, or metaphysically, all those who oppose me."

"There was a lot of violence when we were young — vicious, nasty stuff — and at times it certainly felt an unsafe place to be. It was an awful culture shock when my parents separated, leaving our schools and friends in London and arriving in Glasgow in the early 1960s, which then had a frightening reputation for gang violence. We had occasional visits from my father which always ended in rows. I felt hurt, angry and confused he couldn’t be there for us. I have sat in on sessions with my father while he was working with clients and experienced his genius as a man who could relate to another human’s pain and suffering. There seems to me to be a huge void and contradiction between RD Laing the psychiatrist and Ronnie Laing the father. There was something he was constantly searching for within himself and it tortured him."

"The square root of nothing."

"We’ve got too many problems for him. … He can solve everybody else’s, but not ours."

"Laing had an aching addiction to fame and celebrity and it unquestionably damaged his reputation. … His need for attention was a lifelong problem and robbed his work of credibility, particularly after he had a serious midlife crisis of creativity and felt he had run out of things to say. He became a tragic figure, his behaviour erratic and self-destructive. There were flashes of the old brilliance, but much of his later output was of questionable value. Frankly, it was dreck."

"His most original contribution, the source of his inspiration, what he wrote about and where he wrote from, was the time that he spent listening to mad people. Before Ronnie, few psychiatrists, if any, spoke with such a good ear for madness. There were others including Freud, Jung, Fromm-Reichman and Rosen, who attempted in some way to decode mad-speak, but Ronnie "hung out" with mad people. He was first of all a guy who, with people who were seen as mad, entered into a kind of a friendship; he created space that hadn't before opened up, between himself and the "mad." Also he was very plastic and mimetic, so he could imitate and get into other people's moods, thoughts, language, and world, including those of so-called "mad" people. And he was able to bring back and speak of what it was like to be "mad" (more or less). This gave "mad" people an enormous sense of relief. Someone heard them. They were not alone. Madness was not unreason, a total unintelligibility, a total difference between the sane and the insane. Ronnie showed that we're all in it together. There was not an unbridgeable gulf between sanity and madness: rather there is a continuum. Mad people felt that "this guy really understands what I'm going through." This proved extremely helpful for people who thought they were going mad, or who were told they were mad."

"Ronnie was brilliant, a complete original, but he desperately overdid the drugs and drink. He was one of those drunks whose body would jack it in while his mind kept working. He would be lying on the floor, paralytic but talking nonstop and making perfect sense."

"Laing was profoundly disenchanted with most analysts' closed-minded and dogmatic world-views, and their derogatory attitude toward psychotics. The Freudians and Kleinians in London, for their part, did not trust Laing because he committed the cardinal sin of taking Jung's notion of metanoia seriously. This was not yet evident in 1960, when he published The Divided Self. But it was vividly apparent in The Politics of Experience, published in 1967."

"Insanity — a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world."

"Fed up with the limelight, in 1970, Laing left for India and Ceylon, where he studied Buddhist mediation and Shiviite Yoga for 18 months. He returned a changed man. Unlike his former, angrier, radical self, the new R.D. Laing now enjoined a kind of gentle, Buddhist austerity as the best path to liberation, and expressed a great skepticism about the left's agenda and methods. Moreover, he no longer condemned the nuclear family or the use of psychotropic medication as a treatment of last resort, provided these drugs were taken voluntarily, with the patient's informed consent. He remained categorically opposed to electroshock and involuntary psychiatric treatment, and eager to explore alternatives to psychiatry. But he now rejected the "anti-psychiatry" label that others had placed on him, and made several conciliatory gestures toward his estranged psychiatric colleagues."

"Before one goes through the gate one may not be aware there is a gate One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gate"

"I am doing it the it I am doing is the I that is doing it the I that is doing it is the it I am doing it is doing the I that am doing it I am being done by the it I am doing it is doing it"

"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."

"Many things have changed since The Politics of Experience created such a sensation. The general public isn't as moved by the plight of these people as they were in Laing's day. And though Laing was far more effective with people like these than the average clinician in a one-on-one setting, he never developed a workable alternative to the conventional mental hospital. In the absence of such an alternative, people in distress are inclined to rely on the devil they know. Besides, really good psychotherapy is time and labor intensive. It requires a substantial emotional investment from the therapist as well as the patient. It is not cheap and not fast, and in the recent climate of fiscal restraint we want a quick fix: something clean and cost-effective, not messy and time consuming."

"The madness that we encounter in "patients" is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality; the emergence of the "inner" archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer."