„The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.“

— Michel Foucault

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„The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness“
— Michel Foucault
„There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.“
— Friedrich Nietzsche
„Humor is reason gone mad.“
— Groucho Marx
„The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.“
— Sylvia Plath
„A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.“
— Emil M. Cioran
„That in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, is the end of insanity.“
— Eckhart Tolle
„Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius“
— Marilyn Monroe
„Dialogue and monologue are silenced. Bundled together, men march without Thou and without I, those of the left who want to abolish memory, and those of the right who want to regulate it: hostile and separated hosts, they march into the common abyss.“
— Martin Buber
„In the history of madness, two events signal this change with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad in chains at Bicêtre. Between these two singular and symmetrical events, something happened, whose ambiguity has perplexed historians of medicine: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some, and, according to others, the progressive discovery, by science and philanthropy, of madness in its positive truth. In fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure was taking shape, which did not undo that ambiguity but was decisive for it. This structure explains the passage from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to the experience that is our own, which confines madness in mental illness.“
— Michel Foucault
„Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.“
— Margaret Atwood
„There is little in common between the organised parading of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which madness came to the fore during the Renaissance. The earlier age had found it everywhere, an integral element of each experience, both in images and in real life dangers. During the classical period, it was also on public view, but behind bars. When it manifested itself it was at a carefully controlled distance, under the watchful eye of a reason that denied all kinship with it, and felt quite unthreatened by any hint of resemblance. Madness had become a thing to be observed, no longer the monster within, but an animal moved by strange mechanisms, more beast than man, where all humanity had long since disappeared.“
— Michel Foucault