Madness Quotes

“Every age gets the lunatics it deserves.”
― Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History

“Not least, the asylum idea reflected the long-term cultural shift from religion to scientific secularism. In traditional Christendom, it was the distinction between believers and heretics, saints and sinners, which had been crucial—that between the sane and the crazy had counted for little. This changed, and the great divide, since the ‘age of reason’, became that between the rational and the rest, demarcated and enforced at bottom by the asylum walls. The keys of St Peter had been replaced by the keys of psychiatry.”
― Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History

“In the culture of madness ‘reality’ and ‘representations’ endlessly played off each other. What a crazy world in which the poor had to pretend to be mad in order to get a crust!”
― Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History