Mental Institution Quotes & Sayings

At some point in the last 20 years, the left moved to the center, and the right moved into a mental institution. — Bill Maher

There's a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I'm affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn't want to leave. He likes it very much. — David Bowie

Hey, I'm Maddie. I have been dreaming about you for fifteen years. I was wondering if you were dreaming about me too or if I need to be locked up in a mental institution? — Elena Kincaid

From books, I winnowed the glue that held together my psyche as it struggled to stay whole. It was from stories and myths that I learned to dream, to imagine a different life, to realize potentials and probabilities other than those of the painful, poverty-mired existence I found myself in as a child. With a book I could hide in a corner, safe from the heavy hand and belt of my stepfather, and for a while not worry about where our next meal would come from, or where we would be sleeping that night, or when my mother would break and have to be sent yet again to the mental institution. Books, for me, we tiny life rafts that I clung to desperately. — J. Don Cook

Did you escape a mental institution? "No." "Are you taking any drugs? Were you dropped on your head as a child?" "No and no. Why?" "Because only an idiot would give me shit for sticking around to take care of an unconscious woman who was just attacked. — Eve Langlais

Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can. — Arthur Koestler

I think it was the institution ... I was trying to master it. — E. Lockhart

There was a mental institution near my house, and I would donate time teaching mentally ill patients how to do ceramics. I photographed them as well. So those were my first pictures. — Steven Klein

When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out. — Quincy Jones

You people realize you're going to visit a person who is clinically insane in order to find out your future, right?' Lexie says. 'I mean, who's crazier, the person who's been put in a mental institution or the person who asks that person for advice? — Bree Despain

Hell, at this rate she'd end up in the mental institution by the end of the year. Cause: Celibacy. — Jennifer Probst

If you like using CVS, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else. — Linus Torvalds

I was never in a mental institution for a long time. I was in psych wards. — Darrell Hammond

This is one of the pitfalls of being nice: You end up overexerting yourself. That's why one of the most important things to learn after you master good behavior is how to say no gracefully. It's ultimately better for everyone, because you don't burn out and wind up in a mental institution, making you no good to anyone at all. — Tim Gunn

Her most unusual assignation was a quick visit with Fred Darsey, a young man recently escaped from Milledgeville State Hospital, where he was committed by his parents during a troubled adolescence. Darsey first caught her interest with a blind letter, in March, from the mental institution, revealing his passion for bird-watching. She was startled when her reply was returned and the envelope marked "eloped." She sympathized, when Darsey wrote her again from New York City, "When you have a friend there you feel as if you are there yourself, so you see I feel as if I have escaped too." Carver helped arrange the date, which Flannery kept secret from Regina, in Bryant Park, at the rear of the New York Public Library, with the pen pal she had never met. "I just love to sit and look at the people in New York, or anywhere," she told him, "even in Milledgeville." Flannery wound up her trip north spending the — Brad Gooch

I think it's safe to say that I'll have a hard time even being in the same room as you ... I'm not enjoying it right now. Honestly, I'd rather not have to see you much. I think you're a dick, and a crazy psychopath who belongs in a prison mental institution. I'll never fucking like you and I doubt I'll ever have any respect for you. — J.A. Redmerski

So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth) so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution. — Thomas Szasz

People can be committed to a mental institution only after judicial hearing, but people are committed to schools beyond the reach of Habeas Corpus. — Martin Mayer

I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution. — Tom Verlaine

When you've been locked up in a mental institution, people are going to ask questions. It was OK, because I didn't have to act perfect all the time. — Drew Barrymore

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Upon reflection, I marvel that no one saw through me enough to bundle me off to the nearest mental institution. The fact that it didn't happen depended less on my being a good actress than the fact that I was surrounded, as I had been all my life, by strangers. — Maya Angelou

Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.'
'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul. — Evelyn Waugh

I never really set out to research any of these stories. I try to lead an interesting life though. I guess the closest I came to research was when I applied to work at the state mental institution in Austin, TX. I wanted to work the night shift like Ken Kesey did when he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I thought that might inspire me to write a book that great. — Arthur Bradford

Dr. Spiro seems to think I don't know how to behave in a mental institution. — Louise Wareham

As he followed Wood, Jury thought: one disappearance, two auto accident victims, one in a mental institution, one drowned. One murdered. Rackmoor, for all its bracing sea air, didn't seem the healthiest place in the British Isles. — Martha Grimes

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We're producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another - our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves - anything, that is, except the work we do "to make a living." For everything else, we feel like we've lost the skills, or that there's someone who can do it better ... it seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. — Michael Pollan

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures. — John Powell

It's like, you can't have any fun, and if you do have fun, if you do your own thing, you're considered crazy and should be in a mental institution. Now, that's what I find creepy. I'm eccentric. I am not messed up. — Crispin Glover

Once you've been committed to a mental institution you're considered a second-rate citizen from then on and retroactive. — Mary Jane Ward

I remember at the reception you said to me, 'I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm twenty-three and divorced with two kids.' I said, 'Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now'--we were on the tenth floor--'either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say "I'm going to live," because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had, and either you jump out the window or you live. — Brooke Hayward

You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated. — Michel Foucault

Librarians are trained to be polite, patient, and helpful, no matter who stands across the reference desk.The most important thing is that we look them in the eye and take them seriously. Our work demands that we become dreamers, holding onto hope that our society can be better, that we affirm for our patrons that they are still part of this society, no matter how marginalized they have become. I was raised on the notion that the public library is a civilizing institution. And if our work calms someone's demons or teaches someone else how to treat the mentally ill with respect, then I am proud to be part of the process. — Robert Dawson

Once you've been in a mental institution, people are going to look at you funny. — Drew Barrymore

The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness. — Ashley Montagu

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution - they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing. — Paulo Coelho

I'm definitely not an outsider artist. I'm very much an insider artist. I get written about in art magazines, and I'm not, like, in a mental institution. I'm a regular guy who went to art school. — David Shrigley

The United States were a 35-year-old man, I think he'd be in a mental institution. Violent tendencies - delusions of grandeur - medicate heavily. — Rick Mercer