Academics From Scotland

"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."

"I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not. You must be laughing at me for feeling you are laughing at me if you are not laughing at me."

"If I don't know I don't know I think I know If I don't know I know I think I don't know"

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

"The square root of nothing."

"It is of fundamental importance not to make the positivist mistake of assuming that because a group’s members are in formation this means that they’re necessarily on course."

"We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. I am a specialist, God help me, in events in inner space and time, in experiences called thoughts, images, reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, dreams of memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucinations, refractions of refractions of refractions of that original Alpha and Omega of experience and reality, that Reality on whose repression, denial, splitting, projection, falsification, and general desecration and profanation our civilisation as much as anything is based."

"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."

"Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years."

"Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of others' experience. It is concerned with the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is, with inter-experience. It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it, and your and my behaviour as you experience it."

"Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible. From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful."

"There is no such "condition" as "schizophrenia," but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event."

"Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence". We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience, but only with his behaviour. The other person's behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other's behaviour to the other's experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience."

"Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings."

"I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behaviour. You see my behaviour. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me. Just as you cannot "see" my experience of you. My experience of you is not "inside" me. It is simply you, as I experience you. And I do not experience you as inside me. Similarly, I take it that you do not experience me as inside you. "My experience of you" is just another form of words for "you-as-l-experience-you", and "your experience of me" equals "me-as-you-experience-me". Your experience of me is not inside you and my experience of you is not inside me, but your experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you."

"I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul. Experience as invisibility of man to man is at the same time more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. Psychology is the logos of experience. Psychology is the structure of the evidence, and hence psychology is the science of sciences."

"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."

"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."

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

"But your wights that take no pride to wield A massy spear and well-made shield, Nor joy to draw the sword: Oh, I bring those heartless, hapless drones, Down in a trice on their marrow-bones, To call me King and Lord."

"Mr. Campbell may be said to hold a place (among modern poets) between Lord Byron and Mr. Rogers. With much of the glossy splendour, the pointed vigour, and romantic interest of the one, he possesses the fastidious refinement, the classic elegance of the other. … There are those who complain of the little that Mr. Campbell has done in poetry, and who seem to insinuate that he is deterred by his own reputation from making any further or higher attempts. But after having produced two poems that have gone to the heart of a nation, and are gifts to a world, he may surely linger out the rest of his life in a dream of immortality."

"But youth’s fair form, though fallen, is ever fair, And beautiful in death the boy appears, The hero boy, that dies in blooming years: In man’s regret he lives, and woman’s tears; More sacred than in life, and lovelier far, For having perished in the front of war."

"How glorious fall the valiant, sword in hand, In front of battle for their native land!"

"How glorious is thy girdle cast O'er mountain, tower, and town, Or mirror'd in the ocean vast, A thousand fathoms down! As fresh in yon horizon dark, As young thy beauties seem, As when the eagle from the ark First sported in thy beam. For, faithful to its sacred page, Heaven still rebuilds thy span, Nor lets the type grow pale with age That first spoke peace to man."

"I saw the last of human mould, That shall Creation's death behold, As Adam saw her prime!"

"All worldly shapes shall melt in gloom, The Sun himself must die, Before this mortal shall assume Its Immortality!"

"Roland, the flower of Chivalry, Expired at Roncevall."

"Star that bringest home the bee, And sett'st the weary labourer free!"

"Again to the battle, Achaians! Our hearts bid the tyrants defiance! Our land, the first garden of Liberty's tree, It has been, and shall yet be, the land of the free."

"Absence! is not the soul torn by it From more than light, or life, or breath? 'Tis Lethe's gloom, but not its quiet,— The pain without the peace of death!"

"Triumphal arch, that fill'st the sky When storms prepare to part, I ask not proud Philosophy To teach me what thou art. — Still seem, as to my childhood's sight, A midway station given, For happy spirits to alight, Betwixt the earth and heaven."

"To-morrow let us do or die."

"The torrent's smoothness, ere it dash below!"

"Oh, how hard it is to find The one just suited to our mind!"

"A stoic of the woods—a man without a tear."

"O Love! in such a wilderness as this."

"Drink ye to her that each loves best! And if you nurse a flame That's told but to her mutual breast, We will not ask her name."

"Can all that optics teach, unfold Thy form to please me so, As when I dreamt of gems and gold Hid in thy radiant bow? When Science from Creation's face Enchantment's veil withdraws, What lovely visions yield their place To cold material laws! And yet, fair bow, no fabling dreams, But words of the Most High, Have told why first thy robe of beams Was woven in the sky."

"While the battle rages loud and long, And the stormy winds do blow."

"Ye mariners of England, That guard our native seas; Whose flag has braved, a thousand years, The battle and the breeze!"

"Britannia needs no bulwarks, No towers along the steep; Her march is o'er the mountain waves, Her home is on the deep."

"Cease, every joy, to glimmer on my mind, But leave, oh! leave the light of Hope behind!"

"But sad as angels for the good man's sin, Weep to record, and blush to give it in."

"What though my wingèd hours of bliss have been Like angels visits, few and far between."

"With thunders from her native oak, She quells the floods below."

"The meteor flag of England Shall yet terrific burn, Till danger's troubled night depart, And the star of peace return."

"When o'er the green undeluged earth Heaven's covenant thou didst shine, How came the world's grey fathers forth To watch thy sacred sign. And when its yellow lustre smiled O'er mountains yet untrod, Each mother held aloft her child To bless the bow of God."

"Methinks, thy jubilee to keep, The first-made anthem rang On earth deliver'd from the deep, And the first poet sang. Nor ever shall the Muse's eye Unraptured greet thy beam: Theme of primeval prophecy, Be still the poet's theme!"

"While Memory watches o'er the sad review Of joys that faded like the morning dew."