Quotes & Sayings About Lunatics

Now take a look at the way the Drug War is conducted over the past 40 years. It goes back farther, but start from 40 years ago: There's very little spent on prevention and treatment. There's a lot on policing, a ton of stuff on border control and a lot on out-of-country operations. And the effect on the availability of drugs is almost undetectable; drug prices don't change on measures of availability. So there are two possibilities: Either those conducting the Drug War are lunatics, or they have another purpose. — Noam Chomsky

So what? All writers are lunatics! — Cornelia Funke

In the business I meet some beautiful women, but to be honest, 80 per cent of them are raving lunatics and are to be avoided. It's just insecurity; actors are generally quite insecure. I wouldn't date, or I've never had a fling with an actress, and I'd quite like to keep it that way. — Rory McCann

I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't. — Dylan Thomas

In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch — Bertrand Russell

It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgement on lunatics. How could things be otherwise? — Philip K. Dick

The plumber plodded along in silence, like a man who has learned to be polite to lunatics through dealing with civil engineers. — Lindsey Davis

Im's offspring stare at stars and make clocks that calculate useless happenings like the angle of a hawk's claws as it strikes its prey. They demonstrate their contraptions and everyone marvels. My children get drunk, confuse a herd of cows with an enemy regiment, and slaughter the lot, screaming like lunatics until the entire army panics. — Ilona Andrews

TLC should stand for Toddlers, Lunatics, and Cake. — Natasha Leggero

The only customers they'd get on a day like this were lunatics
well, lunatics and hopeless romantics with a fetish for the smell of dusty old books, which in their eyes probably amounted to the same thing. — Katherine Pine

Is it dark? Yes. Is there something malevolent in the darkness? Yes. Can it do more than merely physically injure us? Yes. Will it kill? Yes. Can we stop it? No. Oh what the hell, let's take a good look anyway. Bloody lunatics!

From soon to be published "Recital - An Austerley & Kirkgordon Adventure — Gary Ross-Jordan

The most genius ideas are in the minds of children and lunatics.
I describe myself as somewhere in between. — Marilyn Manson

Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into the mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby ... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal. — Bill Maher

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

Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep. — Lev Shestov

Birds are the lunatics of the animal world. — Victor Lodato

When anaesthetics were invented they were thought to be wicked as being an attempt to thwart God's will. Insanity was thought to be due to diabolic possession, and it was believed that demons inhabiting a madman could be driven out by inflicting pain upon him, and so making them uncomfortable. In pursuit of this opinion, lunatics were treated for years on end with systematic and conscientious brutality. — Bertrand Russell

No one can deny, in face of the evidence, that it is easy, given military power, to produce a population of fanatical lunatics. It would be equally easy to produce a population of sane and reasonable people, but many governments do not wish to do so, since such people would fail to admire the politicians who are at the head of these governments. — Christopher Hitchens

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. — Susan Sontag

Fortunately the City is vigilant. It too has its secret weapons. Since the summer it has released safety valves that form part of a wonderful mechanism, known only to itself. For the past three months we've noticed the most heartening appearance all over the place of eccentrics, more or less raving lunatics, cranks, and reinvigorating crackpots. — Jacques Yonnet

After twenty years in Canada, there are certain American lunatics who still fascinate me. — John Irving

Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of same stuff. — Bhagat Singh

Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger. — Yasunari Kawabata

We had a national tragedy this week, and the President of the United States and Sarah Palin both made speeches on the same day. Obama came out against lunatics with guns, she gave the rebuttal. — Bill Maher

No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you? — Ken Kesey

Of course I could drive. Idiots and lunatics drove cars. Why not the brilliant Marguerite Johnson? — Maya Angelou

As soon as you ascend to heaven in spirit, by being more spiritual and honest with yourself, you will notice that hell comes to you at the exact same time, and earth will literally feel like hell. Everyone that can't see it went on the opposite direction, from crazy to crazier. They see butterflies instead of worms and juice instead of blood, and can't smell their own rotting flesh. They went from surviving to becoming zombies. That's why I despite the vast majority of those that consider themselves spiritual. They are in fact lunatics disguised as saints. — Robin Sacredfire

It's one thing to spend an afternoon in bed with me," Christopher said darkly. "It's another to experience day-to-day life with a lunatic."
"I know all about living with lunatics. I'm a Hathaway. — Lisa Kleypas

For all the secret societies lunatics out there who think they know anything, why don't you chill..We're ALL guests on Earth, not Management. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Geniuses and lunatics, they aren't that far from one another. That is also evident on you. — Stjepan Varesevac Cobets

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

Forgotten Stars. Time in the Flame.
Missing Shard. The Only Rain.
Door of the Memory. Waves in the Silk.
Silent Birch. Thoughts of Lunatics.
Secret of the Flowers. Soaring of the Souls.
Heart in the Night. And a Kiss Unfolds.
Forgotten Voyager. Voyage in the Words.
Nothing of the World. Someone of the Hemisphere.
Trembling Stones. Sucking Tears.
The Next Gift. The World in the Kisses.
Missing Angels. The Woman of the Girl.
Guardian of the Rings. Thorn in the Pearl.
Whispering Sword. Touching exclaim.
Soul in the Truth. Heat in the Flame.
Thy name, my name, Thy name!
Came. Became. To Remain. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

The maniacal lunatics in control of our society know exactly how human beings tick and they are masters at manipulation. — Bruce McDonald

Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics. — Anna Quindlen

She spent her idle time conceiving of musicals that would never be. It was the only medium that could properly express our true madness and hypocrisy---our collective ability to sit in a theater watching lunatics sing nonsense while the world outside burns. — Dave Eggers

Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics. — Cesare Lombroso

That night I kept thinking about Pandora's box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.
There must have been another box with all the good things in it, like sunshine and love and trees and all that. Who had the good fortune to open that one, and was there one bad thing down there in the bottom of the good box? Maybe it was Worry. Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything. — Sharon Creech

The Spanish and the American audiences are lunatics. They are very passionate and, like the Irish, they don't have as many inhibitions. If you are playing somewhere like Austria or Sweden, it takes them a little while to come out of themselves. — Imelda May

Lunatics are, unfortunately, rarely stupid. — J.D. Robb

The Moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the Moon that pulls the tides, and the Moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the Moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist ... When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness. — D.H. Lawrence

Making art is dealing with people on your own terms. The ideal way of using people is using them like clay, but that being out of the question, except for lunatics and leaders, art is a good alternative. — Lucas Samaras

I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures. — Gary Snyder

When I think now of all the lunatics I knew at Baryton's, I can't help suspecting that the only two manifestations of our innermost being are war and insanity, those two absolute nightmares. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor. — Susanna Kaysen

Those Tea Party people are crazy. I mean, they're lunatics. They close down the government, throw people out of their jobs - hundreds of thousands of people - and they say that they're doing it ultimately in the interest of creating jobs. — George Takei

We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance. [ ... ] We may prate of toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of mistaking sages for lunatics and saviours for blasphemers. We must persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first, to be very careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence. — George Bernard Shaw

Little is known about the love lives of the undead. Really, past the brain-eating, reanimated corpse angle, not much is said for the zombie's perspective. So they ate brains - big deal! Sure, they were corpses - so what? Indeed, there was the smell, but whose fault was that?
At first glance they were brain-hungry cannibals, (Mmm, brains. Maybe with a little cilantro or a garlic rub - mashed potatoes and brainsloaf - brains pot pie - penne a la brains...) but in reality, zombies were not the mindless man-eaters or virus-addled lunatics jonesing for human flesh depicted in the movies. Just like everything in life - or rather, unlife - things were more complicated. Zombies were, until very recently, people. And with that came wants, desires, longings. Needs.
Asher had been troubled by the zombie loneliness until Brenda, the attractive corpse he'd met in a less animated state earlier, pulled him into the cemetery, threw him down on a slab and shagged him silly. — Daniel Younger

When you are in the company of lunatics, behave like a lunatic. When you are in the company of intelligentsias, speak with brilliance ... that is how a chameleon behaves, the territory changes it, and it adapts to the changes. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Matthias rolled his eyes heavenward. These lunatics all needed a solid six months in boot camp and possibly a sound beating. — Leigh Bardugo

The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information- ... That is closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

There are only two types of motorists: the idiots who drive slower than me, and the lunatics who go faster. — George Carlin

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

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. — George Orwell

Oh, I love London Society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be. lord caversham. Hum! Which is Goring? Beautiful idiot, or the other thing? mabel chiltern. — Oscar Wilde

Every age gets the lunatics it deserves. — Roy Porter

Thieves, drunkards, lunatics, wastrels, and whores we might all be, but there ain't a coward among us. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning. — Dorothy L. Sayers

It is easy to kill. It is equally easy to destroy glass windows. Any fool can do either. Why is it only the wise who perceive that it is wisdom to let live, when even lunatics can sometimes understand that it is better to open a window than to smash the glass? — S.M. Stirling

Society has no place for active lunatics. — Snoo Wilson

Love is apt to make lunatics of even men and saints. — Louisa May Alcott

Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics. — Stephen King

The "European Union" happens to be composed of people who hate our guts. It is the continent where Moveon-style lunatics are the friendly, pro-American types and the rest are crazy Muslims. — Ann Coulter

Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment
the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse. — Jasper Fforde

Idiots and lunatics see only their own wit. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

How come all lunatics and murderers are religious these days? — David Lagercrantz

We didn't know if ordinary lunatics or just unstable people on the ground could feel incited to harm me. — Thuli Madonsela

Sincerity is all that counts -- it's a widespread modern heresy. Think again. Bolsheviks are sincere. Fascists are sincere. Lunatics are sincere. People who believe the earth is flat are sincere. They can't all be right. — Tom Driberg

This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane. — Kurt Vonnegut

Glenn Beck retired or got fired ... and a lot of people are asking who will now speak for the raving lunatics who startle you outside of a parking garage? — Bill Maher

Mr. Glass kept complaining about having to drive up to the hotel with that bag on top of the car, but the people didn't even glance at us. My father says Los Angeles is full of lunatics, so I guess they thought we were normal. — Keith Robertson

Politics and hypocrites is turning us all into lunatics. — Marvin Gaye

I will not attempt to describe Gin-Rummy in detail as you can call up any insane asylum and get any patient on the 'phone and learn all about it in no time, as all lunatics are bound to be Gin players, and in fact the chances are it is Gin-Rummy that makes them lunatics. Damon Runyon, The Lacework Kid — David Parlett

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health. — Susanna Kaysen

The world dotes on its lunatics, whether saintly or sadistic, and commemorates their careers. Psychopaths make terrific material for news agencies and movie studios; their exploits always draw a crowd. But the moment a discouraging word is spoken, some depressing knowledge, that crowd either disperses or goes on the attack. It is depression not madness that cows us, demoralization not insanity that we dread, disillusionment of the mind not its derangement that imperils our culture of hope. — Thomas Ligotti

I'd breed a little liberal army in the wood, just like these redneck lunatics I see at the local bar with their tribe of mutant inbred piglets. — Lou Reed

There's some kind of dark symbiosis between lunatics and the Postal Service. — Don Novello

People who dislike budging from their homes or walking beyond their own backyards
and they are always and everywhere in the majority
treat Herodotus' sort, fundamentally unconnected to anyone or anything, as freaks, fanatics, lunatics even. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

And on the moon there is surely water ... And up there, if water exists, and air, then so does life.
A life perhaps different from ours. Perhaps that water has the flavor of (let us say) glycyrrhizin, or cardamon, or even of pepper. If there are infinite worlds, this proves the infinite ingenuity of the Engineer of our Universe, but then there is no limit to this Poet. He can have created inhabited worlds everywhere, but inhabited by ever-different creatures. Perhaps the inhabitants of the sun are sunnier, brighter, and more illuminated than are the inhabitants of the earth, who are heavy with matter, and the inhabitants of the moon lie somewhere in between. On the sun live beings who are all Form, or all Act, if you prefer, while on the earth beings are made of mere Potentials that evolve, and on the moon they are in medio fluctuantes, lunatics, so to speak ... — Umberto Eco

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not so. — William James

It's an odd fact about lunatics and junkies, but every one I'd ever met is just dying to share their life wisdom. — Daniel Polansky

[My mother] would have me smothered like the Princes in the Tower if I showed any inclination for being an artist. She thought all artists little better than lunatics. — Francis Meadow Sutcliffe

A kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. CHAPTER III. - The Suicide — G.K. Chesterton

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them. — George Eliot

My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that. — Sam Harris

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn. — T.H. White

My grandfather felt at home with his lunatics. — Thomas Ligotti

Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life. — Don DeLillo

If strangers see you behaving like lunatics, it doesn't matter, because they don't know who you are. And if your friends see you behaving like lunatics, it doesn't matter, because they know who you are. — D.E. Stevenson

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

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad. — Robert McKee

Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Do you promise to observe seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, Super Criminals and Lunatics and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to science? Will you honor the King's English? ... If you fail to keep your promise, may other writers steal your plots and your pages swarm with misprints. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Politically, I have a lot of differences with many I encounter here. When visiting the homes of reactionary friends and neighbors, I enjoy hiding their copies of books by Glenn Beck and other lunatics around the house while my hosts cook or adjourn to relieve themselves. Ducking into a garage to deposit the latest ravings of Ann Coulter into a bag of aging peat moss lifts the spirit as unfailingly as a summer tent revival. But I am trying to behave. I — George Hodgman

We are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude ... it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the, from the well-being of human beings. It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Ok, just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God's will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can s - can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they're praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.
Now, I'm obviously not saying that all that Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. — Sam Harris

My view of actors is that basically they're all harmless lunatics who'd be on the psychiatrist's couch, except that we get this sort of catharsis every six months or so, and we go and be absolutely someone else. — Michael Caine

If what we're doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad? On the ramp at night, why do we feel the ungainsayable need to get so brutishly drunk? Why did we make the meadow churn and spit? The flies as fat as blackberries, the vermin, the diseases, ach, scheusslich, schmierig - why? Why do rats fetch 5 bread rations per cob? Why did the lunatics, and only the lunatics, seem to like it here? Why, here, do conception and gestation promise not new life but certain death for both woman and child? Ach, why all der Dreck, der Sumpf, der Schleim? Why do we turn the snow brown? Why do we do that? Make the snow look like the shit of angels. Why do we do that? — Martin Amis

The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation. — Sam Harris

We are all eccentrics in our dreams. Lunatics, even. — Jonathan Hull

Take any country that has laws against hate crimes, inspiring hatred and genocide and so on. The first thing they would do is ban the Old Testament. There's nothing like it in the literary canon that exalts genocide, to that extent. And it's not a joke either. Like where I live, New England, the people who liberated it from the native scourge were religious fundamentalist lunatics, who came waving the holy book, declaring themselves to be the children of Israel who are killing the Amalekites, like God told them. — Noam Chomsky

But I have known many women
many women indeed, and it is in their nature to confound us, Othello. They are all by their natures lovely lunatics. — Christopher Moore

Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe. — Sam Harris