Quotes & Sayings About Asylums

The universities are a sort of lunatic asylum for keeping young men out of mischief. — Mandell Creighton

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. — G.K. Chesterton

This stuff they are talking here in Congress costs the people of the United States $44 a page. That's beside what it costs to ship it to the asylums where it's read. — Will Rogers

The mad were put in asylums, but the sane are worse off in their offices. — Hanif Kureishi

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love. — Madeleine L'Engle

Wisdom
is in the insane asylums.
The end
is in the everyday-pale smiles — Saif Alsaegh

There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out. — Samuel Butler

Happy, thrice happy shall they be pronounced hereafter, who have contributed any thing, who have performed the meanest office in erecting this stupendous fabrick of Freedom and Empire on the broad basis of Independency; who have assisted in protecting the rights of humane nature and establishing an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions. — George Washington

Great," Lee sighed, side-stepping through. "Just when I thought I'd gotten out of wandering through the creepy graveyard, you find another way."
Smiling as he followed her through, he assured her, "Don't worry, I'm a professional." He seemed to find her nervousness amusing.
"And just so you know," she grumbled, "this absolutely does not count as our date."
He burst out laughing. "That's too bad. Now I'll have to make other plans. How do you feel about abandoned insane asylums? — Kaye Thornbrugh

Doubtless the lunatic asylums of the world are filled with unfortunate women who have failed to see my charms. — Cassandra Clare

When I cease to preach salvation by faith in Jesus put me into a lunatic asylum, for you may be sure that my mind is gone. — Charles Spurgeon

People in the world can never imagine the length of days to those in asylums. They seemed never ending, and we welcomed any event that might give us something to think about as well as talk of. — Nellie Bly

Earth is an insane asylum, to which the other planets deport their lunatics. — Voltaire

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more. — Margaret Atwood

The lunatics have taken charge of the asylum. — Richard A. Rowland

In Russia they put you in insane asylums if you disagree with the state: it's not so different here. Keep the natives quiet. — Marilyn French

There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death. — Antonin Artaud

If we, who live outside asylums, act as if we lived in a fictitious world- that is to say, if we are consistent with our beliefs- we cannot adjust ourselves to actual conditions, and so fall into many avoidable semantic difficulties. But the so-called normal person practically never abides by his beliefs, and when his beliefs are building for him a fictitious world, he saves his neck by not abiding by them. A so-called "insane" person acts upon his beliefs, and so cannot adjust himself to a world which is quite different from his fancy. — Alfred Korzybski

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness. — Antonin Artaud

We cannot possibly take them all into this country [asylum seekers] - it is a completely unrealistic expectation. — Michael Howard

Each of us is armed with this touchstone of actuality; by applying it we decide that this sorry world of ours is actual and Utopia is a dream. As our individual consciousnesses are different, so our touchstones are different; but fortunately they all agree in their indication of actuality - or at any rate those which agree are in sufficient majority to shut the others up in lunatic asylums. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns. — Herman Wouk

I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong. — George Washington

The asylum years taught me a lot about myself. Bear in mind I'm the only lunatic in the United Kingdom who spent time in all three max secure asylums, which you should now know are ... Rampton, Broadmoor and Ashworth. Don't ask me which is the best or the worst, as how do you compare insanity with insanity? — Stephen Richards

Christianity has made more lunatics than it ever provided asylums for. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Wasn't that awesome?" Seth asked.
Warren cocked his head, his expression mildly embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Kendra
it was pretty cool."
"All boys belong in insane asylums," Kendra said. — Brandon Mull

In the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them. — Lin Yutang

68. By then all poets will live in artistic communities calls jails or asylums. 69. Our imaginary home, the home we share. — Roberto Bolano

It's such a tragedy that man endures in killing his brother and his own kind, putting him in jail and insane asylums, letting him lay out in the street. — Sun Ra

If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers. — E.W. Howe

I think there was no other profession for me. I was either going into an insane asylum or to be an actor. — Olivia Wilde

Closing the asylums has not brought us any closer to working out how we should respond to mental illness. We still prefer to think that out of mind should mean out of sight. — Mark Stevens

Enforced maternity brings into the world wretched infants, whom their parents will be unable to support and who will become the victims of public care or 'child martyrs'. It must be pointed out that our society, so concerned to defend the rights of the embryo, shows no interest in the children once they are born; it prosecutes the abortionists instead of undertaking to reform that scandalous institution known as 'public assistance'; those responsible for entrusting the children to their torturers are allowed to go free; society closes its eyes to the frightful tyranny of brutes in children's asylums and private foster homes. — Simone De Beauvoir

In his 1973 "literary investigation," The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: "If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the 'secret brand'); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. — Donnie Eichar

Friendship is like those ancient altars where the unhappy, and even the guilty, found a sure asylum. — Sophie Swetchine

The world's full of people with unusual beliefs, Julia. Scientologists, Rastafarians, Catholics, Moonies, Mormons, Baptists, Tories, dentists, captains of industry - every madness has its cheerleader. The asylums and parliament are crammed full of delusionists, and only a madman would want to eliminate them. — Hanif Kureishi

Flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home. — Herman Melville

I become more convinced that beings from other planets are using the Earth as a lunatic asylum — George Bernard Shaw

I hope to be granted asylum. Deportation [ from Germany] that would be a death sentence for me. — Irakli Okruashvili

It seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate. — James Bryant Conant

And a united Europe will also manage to send hundreds of thousands of migrants, who don't have the right to asylum, back to their homelands. Though that, given the number of flights necessary, would be of a scale reminiscent of the Berlin Airlift. — Paolo Gentiloni

own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible - it was not good for one either - trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land - I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you? - with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums - how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into by the way of solitude - utter solitude without a policeman - by the way of silence, utter silence, — Joseph Conrad

In the 1970s, a group of researchers got themselves deliberately confined to mental asylums across United States. They did this by pretending to hear voices. They pretended to hear a voice saying, Empty, Dull and Thud.
But as soon as they were admitted to the wards, they stopped pretending and never mention the voice again.
And here's the mad part
The hospital staff outright refused to believe they were better, and kept them locked up anyway - some of them for months on end -each forced into accepting they had a mental illness, and agreeing to take drugs as a condition of their release. This is what labels do. They stick. — Nathan Filer

I would be happy to accept asylum, political asylum, in India a nation I love. In return, I will bring Mayawati a range of the finest British footwear. — Julian Assange

All boys belong in insane asylums. — Brandon Mull

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials. — Mark Twain

But that is who we are, that is where we come from. We are the offspring of metropolitan annihilation and destruction, of the war of all against all, of the conflict of each individual with every other individual, of a system governed by fear, of the compulsion to produce, of the profit of one to the detriment of others, of the division of people into men and women, young and old, sick and healthy, foreigners and Germans, and of the struggle for prestige. Where do we come from? From isolation in individual row-houses, from the suburban concrete cities, from prison cells, from the asylums and special units, from media brainwashing, from consumerism, from corporal punishment, from the ideology of nonviolence, from depression, from illness, from degradation, from humiliation, from the debasement of human beings, from all the people exploited by imperialism. — Ulrike Marie Meinhof

There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. — Carl Jung

I was the outsider in Fernhall House, but they were all outsiders really. Outside society. Outside time. You hear people say that those in asylums and care facilities are out of their minds. But in truth their minds are often the one thing they are not out of. Their whole being is sheltering behind walls of muscle and bone. Everything they are - and are not - exists within their sacrosanct headspace. — Jonathan Lee

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for. — Jane Fonda

Half the people in our asylums may be suffering from a physical lesion of the brain but the others are unaccountably insane. The real reason is demoniac possession brought about by looking upon terrible things that they were never meant to see. — Dennis Wheatley

Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob. — Herman Melville

We still have disgraceful policies on asylum seekers and Aboriginal Australians continue to die in custody. — Justine Larbalestier

There was a period when I lived on book reviews, when I had basked and drawn sustenance from what I deemed the light of their intelligence, the beneficience of their charm. But something had gone sour. Over the years I had read too much, in dim-lighted railway stations, lying on the davenports of strangers' houses, in the bleak and dismal wards of insane asylums. That reading had forced the charm to relinquish itself. Now I found that reviews were not only bland but scarcely, if ever, relevant; and that all books, whether works of imagination or the blatant frauds of literary whores, were approached by the reviewer with the same crushing sobriety. I wanted to reviewer to be fair, kind, and funny. I wanted to be made to laugh. — Frederick Exley

Normal people don't wall their wives up in insane asylums. They don't disinherit their sons because they didn't get the child they wanted. — Leigh Bardugo

I will turn directly to the Asylum Bill later. — John Major

I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all. — Stephen King

Asylums are crazy places, with crazy rules. If you're not mad when you arrive, you are when you leave. (That's if you ever leave.) I was lucky ... I got slung out; they couldn't afford to keep me any longer. — Stephen Richards

The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society. — Mother Jones

America is a lunatic asylum. — Ezra Pound

The simplest way to attract a ghost was to sit quietly and open yourself up to the interactions. He'd seen those shows where a passel of tough guys ran around abandoned asylums and jails, hollering macho taunts at the spirits. There was a reason they rarely found any useful evidence or got more than a banging door for their troubles: ghosts didn't answer to shitheels. — Lauren M. Roy

In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals. — Thomas R. Insel

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England. — Virginia Woolf

They're caught where there's no way out or where you can't see out. What are you going to do about it? I don't have the answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums. — Ric Ocasek

I've invaded the walls of the asylums with my ink pen. The way they look at mental illness won't be the same again — Stanley Victor Paskavich

There are different categories of madmen, and different types of asylums! I know absolutely nothing about the asylums that house the madman who thinks he is a space man. Would you believe that 90% of madmen are treated in outside clinics? — Stephen Richards

If I weren't doing what I'm doing now, the actress thing, the star business, if you want to call it that, whatever it is, I'd be in an asylum. I'm sure of it. — Mia Farrow

In the United States, the person who led the fight to reform treatment of the mentally ill and to develop asylums was Dorothea Dix. Often neglected in history, Dix was a nurse — Molly Caldwell Crosby

The lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want. — Steve Jobs

The United States should be an asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty. — Thomas Paine

Our asylum system is sick. — Romano L. Mazzoli

Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die! — John Cage

Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc. — Henry Miller

cloak of secrecy: the private asylums and single-lodging establishments, both — Catherine Bailey

I've always wondered about Stop-and-Go guys. Do you like it if drivers wave and say thanks as they go past? Or is it better if they ignore you? Most times when I'm out in the car with Bull, I give a wave and a "thanks". Usually the guy with the sign stares at me as if I've just escaped from an asylum. So what's the right thing to do?'
'I've never met anyone like you before, Tiffany.'
'Really?'
'No - never.'
'Then you just haven't been to enough asylums. — Bill Condon

ALEXIS
I have made some converts to the principle that men and women should be coupled in matrimony without distinction of rank. I have lectured on the subject at Mechanics' Institutes, and the mechanics were unanimous in favour of my views. I have preached in workhouses, beershops and Lunatic Asylums, and I have been received with enthusiasm. I have addressed navvies on the advantages that would accrue to them if they married wealthy ladies of rank, and not a navvy dissented!
ALINE
Noble fellows! And yet there are those who hold that the uneducated classes are not open to argument! And what do the countesses say?
ALEXIS
Why, at present, it can't be denied, the aristocracy hold aloof.
ALINE
Ah, the working man is the true Intelligence after all!
ALEXIS
He is a noble creature when he is quite sober. — W.S. Gilbert

I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum. — Werner Herzog

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths. — Antonin Artaud

The insane asylum on Blackwell's Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out. — Nellie Bly

I remember to this day how easily I could grasp what he called his tentative ideas when he talked about the architectural style of the capitalist era, a subject which he said had fascinated him since his own student days, speaking in particular of the compulsive sense of order and the tendency towards monumentalism evident in law courts and penal institutions, railway stations and stock exchanges, opera houses and lunatic asylums, and the dwelling built to rectangular grid patterns for the labor force. — W.G. Sebald

I believe at least in one of the chief tenets of the Christian faith
contentment with a lowly place. I am a doctor and I know that ambition
the desire to succeed
to have power
leads to most ills of the human soul. If the desire is realized it leads to arrogance, violence and final satiety; and if it is denied
ah! if it is denied
let all the asylums for the insane rise up and give their testimony! The are filled with human beings who were unable to face being mediocre, insignificant, ineffective and who therefore created for themselves ways of escape from reality so to be shut off from life itself forever. — Agatha Christie

Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums, and those in cemeteries. — Everett Dirksen

Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being - man - is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Good care is taken that each state shall have its prisons ... and other asylums; but not one building is erected nor one law enforced that would teach the people how not to contribute to these over-crowded receptacles of human misery ... All of our politicians are ready to deal with the effects, but not one of them is brave enough to penetrate the substratum of society and deal with the cause. — Victoria Woodhull

I'm sitting in front of the TV, watching Jerry Springer, and it makes me think of how many mad people there are in the world, and whether everyone is mad deep down, they just pretend they're not, and it's the people in asylums or on Jerry Springer who are the honest ones. I have a notebook and a chewed-up pen, and I'm trying to think of a topic for the Youth Issues speech. Mrs Thomas says she thinks I have a lot to say, but I don't. Nothing I can put words to anyway. I could talk about bullying, or alcoholism, but I don't think I could speak about that out loud, it's too real, and it'd be like I was standing up there naked. More than naked. It would be like my skin was all peeled off and I was just standing there with my heart all bloody and thumping in my rib cage for everyone to see. — Megan Jacobson

Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates. — Erving Goffman

Lawsuits generally originate with the obstinate and the ignorant, but they do not end with them; and that lawyer was right who left all his money to the support of an asylum for fools and lunatics, saying that from such he got it, and to such he would bequeath it. — Jeremy Bentham

I spent hours yesterday talking of little but medical symptoms and insane asylums. And you listened as though it were poetry and all but swooned at my feet. It is too bad I don't have any medical treatises about. I'm sure I need read a paragraph or two, and you will become ravenous with lust and begin tearing my clothes off. (Dorian from "The Mad Earl's Bride") — Loretta Chase

Looking back at the years I spent in the asylums, I'm now convinced some of that insanity rubbed off onto me! — Stephen Richards

The message that "we can't take in everybody" is imperative. At the same time, the decision as to who has a right to asylum needs to be made in Brussels. — Paolo Gentiloni

Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

This planet is obviously being used as an insane asylum by other planets. — George Bernard Shaw

What sad faces one always sees in the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head. — Theodore Parker

can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there — G.K. Chesterton

The world's most brilliant confabulators are in asylums. — Stephen King

Hollywood-a place where the inmates are in charge of the asylum. — Laurence Stallings

For some readers, I dare say, the word 'institution' still conjures up a Victorian vision of lunatic asylums: poor old Niall, he's in an institution now. That is not the kind of institution I mean. I am talking about, for example, political institutions, like the British Parliament or the American Congress. When we talk about — Niall Ferguson

On the other hand, I must mention that, by a diligent search in lunatic asylums, I have found individual cases of patients who where unquestionably endowed with great talents, and whose genius distinctly appeared through their madness, which, however, had completely gained the upper hand. — Arthur Schopenhauer