INSANITY

Related Subjects: Eccentricity, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Suicide

1. Babylon in all its desolation is a sight not so awful as that of the human mind in ruins.—SCROPE DAVIES
   

2. For many centuries the insane were regarded as demoniacs and were consequently often handed over to the exorcist or even to the executioner, when they were not completely abandoned. In later times they were frequently treated as criminals and paupers and as such came under the supervision of penal and poor law authorities.—ALBERT DEUTSCH, Treatment of the Mentally Ill in America
   

3. There is a pleasure sure
   In being mad which none but madmen know.—DRYDEN, The Spanish Friar
   

4. No man is quite sane. Each has a vein of folly in his composition—a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which he has taken to heart.—EMERSON
   

5. Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of their senses.—EURIPIDES
   

6. Insane people easily detect the nonsense of other people.—JOHN HALLAM
   

7. Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.—O. W. HOLMES, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
   

8. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity.—SAMUEL JOHNSON
   

9. The difference between an insane man and a fool is, that a fool from right principles draws a wrong conclusion, while an insane person draws a just inference from false principles.—LOCKE
   

10. 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.—POE, Eleanora
    

11. If madness were pain, you'd hear outcries in every house.—Proverb
    

12. As mad as a March hare.—Proverb
    

13. Unemployment, overwork, congestion of population, child labor, and the hundred economic factors which increase the stress of living for the poor are often contributing factors in the production of mental disease.—T. W. SALMON
    

14. That he is mad, 'tis true; 'tis true 'tis pity
    And pity 'tis 'tis true.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
    

15. Oh! that way madness lies; let me shun that.—SHAKESPEARE, King Lear
    

16. Mental disorder, as we ordinarily meet it, is a disorder of the individual as a social unit. It is not a purely individual affair like an infection, for instance, but is a disorder of the individual at the level of social adjustment.—WILLIAM A. WHITE