Wit & Attitude Quote by Sun Ra

Sun Ra frames violence as a civic failure, not just a personal sin: the “tragedy” isn’t only that people hurt each other, but that whole systems are built to keep the hurt circulating. The line moves fast from the intimate (“killing his brother”) to the institutional (“jail and insane asylums”) to the public and visible (“lay out in the street”), a grim progression from fratricide to bureaucracy to abandonment. He’s naming a society that can always find a container for human crisis except care.

The intent feels less like moralizing and more like diagnosis. Sun Ra, the cosmic bandleader who staged alternatives through sound, is talking about Earth as a place that mistakes containment for solutions. Jails and asylums appear as twin technologies of disposal: one punishes, one pathologizes, both remove the “problem” from sight. Then he lands on the street, where removal fails and the neglect becomes undeniable. That final image is blunt on purpose; it’s the everyday apocalypse outside the metaphysics.

Context matters: Sun Ra comes out of mid-century America, where racial violence, poverty, and policing weren’t abstract topics but daily weather, and where “insanity” could be a label that neutralized dissent as easily as it treated illness. His phrasing (“his own kind”) refuses tribal loopholes; he’s not letting anyone pretend the violence is someone else’s pathology. It’s collective self-harm, normalized, administered, and ultimately shrugged at. The sentence is long, breathless, like a lament you can’t neatly resolve - which is the point.