Institutionalization Quotes

We treat old people like we treat animals—just put them in a cage somewhere until they die.

They said if I stayed in the orphanage for another month or so, I basically would not have been able to be alive.

Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

Once you've been in a mental institution, people are going to look at you funny.

When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.

Community begins in mystery and ends in administration. Leaders move away from people and into paper.

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

I wrote a lot of lyrics in prison, but they'd all be like, 'Crawls upon the shoulders, hatred in the eyes.' I wrote about 50 songs in there that were all about jail. I've come out and thought, 'I've only served eight weeks; I can't really write a concept album about jail.'

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and the police.

George W. Bush legalized torture, but Obama is legalizing impunity. He promised to roll stuff back, but he is institutionalizing these things forever. It is terrifying and the left doesn't seem to recognize it.

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

What comes after the revolution is inevitably bureaucracy. Whoever wins the revolution builds a bureaucracy.

Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.

For those that don't know, my sister was born with Down Syndrome, and she was institutionalized in the very early sixties. Me, being just a small boy and being shuffled around between my mother and grandparents, I never knew her.

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.

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.

We also had a beautiful feature where the writer used the story of two mentally ill relatives, one of whom killed his dad, to explore the history of how we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, only to re-institutionalize them - but in jails and prisons. There's much more to come.

For digital natives, public schools are jails

It's [Jail's] like being at school. Except you can't leave.

Protectionism is the institutionalization of economic failure.

When you create a church, an institution, and you create a dogma. When you create an ideology, that's the danger. Communism, too, is a beautiful idea, but millions of people died when communism became an ideology.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.