Kenneth Rexroth Quotes

Is all the world jails and churches?

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

Rather than being any longer a threat to the established … order, Christianity became what practically all this earth's religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order.

I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within the Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens—chained naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.

It is not possible to assume that a world carried on by division of labor and authority, can be governed by universal opinions in the whole population.

Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed.

I did a lot of research on what solitary confinement does to you, how you become acclimated to being surrounded by people again after being by yourself for such a long time. It's really a horrific thing. It's definitely worth considering it as torture. We're just not meant to be in solitary confinement.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

Go and lie down in the dark... for hours... and don't move. I'm locking the door now

The present blitz about drugs - I think it looks very much like how we treated insane people 100 years ago -- throw them in the cage - as if that's the whole answer. And it's not the whole answer.

Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.

As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.

The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.

Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.

Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections.

Religion supports and perpetuates the social organization it reflects.

I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled.

Do you know what amazes me more than anything else? The impotence of force to organize anything.

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

My care is like my shadow in the sun, Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it, Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

The foundation of the world lies in the nation. The foundation of the nation lies in the family. The foundation of the family lies in the individual.

It's my belief that sanity lies in realizing that reality is not exactly what we had in mind.