Insanity Quotes (8 quotes)
Disinterestedness is as great a puzzle and paradox as ever. Indeed, strictly speaking, it is a species of irrationality, or insanity, as regards the individual’s self; a contradiction of the most essential nature of a sentient being, which is to move to pleasure and from pain.
In On the Study of Character: Including an Estimate of Phrenology (1861), 202.
Faith is a permanent and vital endowment of the human mind—a part of reason itself. The insane alone are without it.
A Shadow Passes (1919), 62.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
…...
Knowledge is like a knife. In the hands of a well-balanced adult it is an instrument for good of inestimable value; but in the hands of a child, an idiot, a criminal, a drunkard or an insane man, it may cause havoc, misery, suffering and crime. Science and religion have this in common, that their noble aims, their power for good, have often, with wrong men, deteriorated into a boomerang to the human race.
In 'Applied Chemistry', Science (22 Oct 1915), New Series, 42, No. 1086, 548.
The different sorts of madness are innumerable.
— Avicenna
The Canon, Bk IV.
The greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group. … only group efforts can save us from the sporadic insanities of the group.
In 'The Clint Eastwood Conundrum', The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1997), 7.
The mere existence of nuclear weapons by the thousands is an incontrovertible sign of human insanity.
Epigraph in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 180.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
As quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006, 2008), Preface, 28.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
