Antonin Artaud Quotes

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

This is what the establishment is scared of: Of joy, the sense of humour, of irony.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

I'm not out here trying putting on an act like I'm crazy. In my opinion, everyone else is crazy. They're the ones who put on an act for you, doing what they're told in front of the camera.

Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.

Being crazy isn't enough.

One way to work the system is to work the system. The other way is to refuse to work it.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.

And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm.

For mad I may be, but I will never be convenient.

I have toyed with the idea of playing it straight. But, like I say, I really believe we are all out of our minds at some level.

I don't buy into the idea that you're not supposed to rock & roll after a certain date. Maybe I should be in Bellevue, but I'm just having a good time.

... he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

you may be right, I may be crazy, but it just might be a lunatic you're looking for

The only interesting ideas are heresies

[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

Madness is a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.

Mad; adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.

It is not a band. It is an idea.

Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.

I'm not a critic. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a philosopher. Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.