"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
— Philip K. Dick

"Mad hatter: how is a raven like a writing desk?
*squabble*
Alice: so how IS a raven like a writing desk?
Mad Hatter: I haven't the slightest idea."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us"
— Kahlil Gibrán (The Madman)

"Madness is the acme of intelligence.
"
— Naguib Mahfouz

"All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"You call it madness, but I call it love."
— Don Byas

"No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness."
— Aristotle

"Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? - The Joker"
— Grant Morrison (Batman: Arkham Asylum)

"He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. "I will go mad!" he annouced."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1-4)

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
— Akira Kurosawa

"The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

""There is always some madness in love, but there's also always some reason in madness.""
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There nearly always is a method in madness."
— Chesterton, G. K.

"Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness."
— Karen Joy Fowler (Sarah Canary)

"Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation"
— Julia Kristeva (Black Sun)

"It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed
"
— Thomas Moore

"And how do you know that you're mad? "To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?" I suppose so, said Alice. "Well then," the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags it's tale when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.""
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass)

"Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric."
— A.C. Grayling (The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life)

"Great wits are to madness near allied / And thin partitions do their bounds divide."
— Alexander Pope

"Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness."
— Gustave Flaubert (Memoirs of a Madman)

"Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it."
— Ted Morgan

"Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death."
— Ronald David Laing

"'You don't seem mad at all,' she said.

'But I am, although I'm undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being mad, living life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?'"
— Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption)

"Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house"
— William Gass

"I never think of policemen's wives; their beauty maddens me like wine."
— Kyril Bonfiglioli

"Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked. "
— Michael Gruber (The Book of Air and Shadows)

"If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!"
— H.P. Lovecraft (THE TEMPLE)

"As long as he deceived himself about the truth, he could blame fortune and have confidence in the future. Now the clouds of madness were closing round his mind."
— Hermann Bahr

"Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go. "
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man
That function is smothered in surmise,
And nothing is but what is not."
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

"What a piece of work is a man"
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Maturity Is The Acceptance Of Ones Madness"
— Nicole Stacey-O'Reilly