Top 100 Quotes About Madmen
#1. When one lives among madmen, one should train as a maniac.
Alexandre Dumas
#2. Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
Emile M. Cioran
#3. Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.
Albert Camus
#4. Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them.
Alan Moore
#5. I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
James Baldwin
#6. There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.
Robert Anton Wilson
#7. I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself
Milan Kundera
#8. Much of what we call History is the success stories of madmen.
John Holt
#9. Nearly a half century ago, while Social-Democratic and Communist theoreticians babbled about a society with "work for all," the Dadaists, those magnificent madmen, demanded unemployment for everybody.
Murray Bookchin
#10. Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.
Emil Cioran
#11. Do I lack madmen, that you have brought this fellow to behave as a madman in my presence? Shall
Anonymous
#12. What Richard Selzer, M.D. once wrote of surgery is true of therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen.
Thomas Lewis
#14. Anger and jealousy's all that he sells us, he's content when you're under his thumb. Madmen oppose him, but your kindness throws him, to survive it you play deaf and dumb.
Bob Dylan
#15. What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
#16. He was happy because, after such a long study, experimentation, and struggle, he could at last affirm the ultimate truth: there never were and never would be any madmen in Itaguai or anywhere else.
Machado De Assis
#17. At many a moment on many a day, I am convinced that pro football must be a game for madmen, and I must be one of them.
Vince Lombardi
#18. Sometimes luck belongs to children and madmen.
Robin Hobb
#19. I am able to play monsters well. I understand monsters. I understand madmen.
Anthony Hopkins
#21. All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought / Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat; / For the greater the fool in the pencil more blest, / And when they are drunk they always paint best.
William Blake
#22. He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.
Vasily Grossman
#25. I love men. I've always been drawn to poets, artists, and madmen. Sometimes all three in one
Jessica Lange
#26. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back
John Maynard Keynes
#27. This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses.
George W. Bush
#28. Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And - how many of us do know it?
Philip K. Dick
#30. No. You should take pleasure in following the Lethani. If you fight well, you should take pride in doing a thing well. For the fighting itself you should feel only duty and sorrow. Only barbarians and madmen take pleasure in combat. Whoever loves the fight itself has left the Lethani behind.
Patrick Rothfuss
#31. Late-night shortwave: province of ramblers and dreamers, madmen and ranters.
Anthony Doerr
#32. We believed ourselves indestructable ... watching only the madmen outside our frontiers, and we remained defenseless against our own madmen.
Jacobo Timerman
#33. Only criminals and madmen walk into Central Park after midnight...or, occasionally, an actor. (Dark City Lights)
Jane Dentinger
#34. The world was full of such madmen in those days. Imprisonment is not the way to deal with such people; half measures merely feed their pride. Leave 'em alone or hang 'em, in my opinion. Or better still, pack them off to the Americas, and let them starve.
Iain Pears
#35. Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#36. The numbers are a catalyst that can help turn raving madmen into polite humans.
Philip J. Davis
#37. When the cold winds come and find you
Blowing down from the top of the high rise
I'll come and take you back down to Soho
Away from all those madmen's eyes
Shane MacGowan
#38. There is a pleasure sure
In being mad, which none but madmen know.
Dryden, The Spanish Friar II, i
Gerald Durrell
#39. Society is older than government. But every persisting society implies the existence of government and laws; for a society without government and laws is at once overturned by its madmen and scoundrels and lapses into barbarism.
William Batchelder Greene
#40. Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
Robert M. Pirsig
#41. I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
J.G. Ballard
#42. The madmen seem to live on forever, don't they?
Lauren Bacall
#43. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.
Thomas Sankara
#44. Patches of stained red grass. Rotting baby limbs at dusk. The sound of cicadas and laughter; picnics with madmen by the black lake at noon.
Andrew Gallacher
#45. If the [Vestiges] be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!
Adam Sedgwick
#46. There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself.
Denis Diderot
#47. Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is so
ordinary that the whippers are in love too.
William Shakespeare
#48. Merjack and Whelms wouldn't be satisfied until Devyn was dead. They were like madmen who couldn't be won with reason or intellect. Devyn was going to die. And most likely so would she.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#49. When you live entirely among madmen, it is difficult to know how sane you are.
Robert Aickman
#50. I've written about superheroes. I've written about talking ferrets and math geniuses being chased by madmen. I've written about spies and demon-hunting soccer moms. I've created an entire world that centers around a paranormal judicial system.
Julie Kenner
#51. I have been known as a crank, faddist, madman. Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to myself cranks, faddists, and madmen.
Mahatma Gandhi
#52. The time for princes and tsars and holy madmen was gone.
In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and
telephones, murder and assassination.
Marcus Sedgwick
#54. These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being. How these madmen
give themselves away! The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall. But the God created from human vanity sees
no difference between an eagle and a sparrow.
Bram Stoker
#55. We painters use the same license as poets and madmen.
Paolo Veronese
#56. Seashores are good for madmen - provided they're not too mad.
Saul Bellow
#57. Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
Georges Bataille
#58. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they, could force their will on the weak and peace-loving.
Tad Williams
#59. Artists are meant to be madmen, to disturb and shock us.
Anne Rice
#60. Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.
Fritz Leiber
#61. Cause I'd rather stay here
With all the madmen
Than perish with the sadmen roaming free
And I'd rather play here
With all the madmen
For I'm quite content they're all as sane
As me
David Bowie
#63. Life is short; this being so, who would pursue great things and not bear with what is at hand? These are the ways of madmen and men of evil counsel, at least in my judgment.
Euripides
#64. the worst madmen don't seem odd at all," Grimm said. "They appear to be quite calm and rational, in fact. Until the screaming starts.
Jim Butcher
#66. All men are mad in some way or another, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world.
Bram Stoker
#68. Some of the madmen are really fun to be with. I soon learnt to relate to them. I soon became one of them. I ended up the maddest of the mad. There is no madder than myself! Please believe it.
Stephen Richards
#70. That is why embittered people find heroes and madmen a perennial source of fascination, for they have no fear of life or death. Both heroes and madmen are indifferent to danger and will forge ahead regardless of what other people say.
Paulo Coelho
#71. They marched like madmen from place to place, until overcome by exhaustion and lack of strength they could no longer move from one side to the other, and they remained there, wherever this sad siren voice had summoned them, self-important, and dead.
David Grann
#72. He was astonished likewise that they did not see it was impossible for men to comprehend anything of all those wonders, seeing they who have the reputation of being most knowing in them are of quite different opinions, and can agree no better than so many fools and madmen;
Xenophon
#74. My mother taught me long ago that only madmen fight wars they cannot win.
George R R Martin
#75. I'd rather stay here with all the madmen than perish with the sadmen roaming free.
David Bowie
#78. He who without the Muse's madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.
Plato
#79. Kings fight for empires, madmen for applause.
John Dryden
#80. Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe.
Carl Sagan
#81. We have to have armies! We have to have military power! We have to have police forces, whether it's police in a great city or police in an international scale to keep those madmen from taking over the world and robbing the world of its liberties.
Billy Graham
#82. Oh, sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise. By mountains pil'd on mountains to the skies? Heav'n still with laughter the vain toil surveys, And buries madmen in the heaps they raise.
Alexander Pope
#83. To save the audience we must fill the stage with murderers, adulterers and madmen; in short, we must fire a salvo of monsters at them. They are our monster which we will temporarily free ourselves from only to face another day.
Nelson Rodrigues
#84. True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#85. Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#86. They used to be seen as insane or unthinkable acts of madmen. But if they take place they'll be called 'war' too. And there will still be no conventional war.
Bruce Sterling
#87. All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
Barbara Kingsolver
#88. The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.
C.S. Lewis
#89. We've all become god's madmen, all of us.
Bram Stoker
#90. As though God had turned away from the wise, and written his decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of
fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!
Baruch Spinoza
#91. True dreamers are both geniuses and madmen. Most lands can tolerate only a few, and those die young.
N.K. Jemisin
#92. When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.
John Le Carre
#93. The seriousness of madmen is one of the most exhausting realities.
Glen Duncan
#94. To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to Happiness.
Thomas Traherne
#95. Only madmen and fools are pleased with themselves; no wise man is good enough for his own satisfaction.
Benjamin Whichcote
#96. The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar ... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
Aldous Huxley
#97. The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick
#98. Calumny is only the noise of madmen.
Diogenes
#99. A strange coldness had settled upon Achamian, the monolithic selfishness of which only children and madmen are sometimes capable.
R. Scott Bakker
#100. Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen,
Aldous Huxley