Daily Inspiration Quote by R. D. Laing

A clinical punchline dressed up as gallows philosophy, Laing’s line takes the language of public health and turns it against our most sentimental myths about existence. Calling life a “sexually transmitted disease” is deliberately obscene: it yokes the origin story we romanticize (sex, reproduction, family) to the vocabulary we use for stigma, quarantine, and fear. The wit isn’t just shock value; it’s a perspective shift. If you describe birth the way a risk-averse bureaucracy might, the cozy idea of “the gift of life” starts to look like a compulsory infection passed along without consent.

The second clause lands like a diagnosis: “the mortality rate is one hundred percent.” Laing uses the cold authority of statistics to erase our usual exceptions and bargaining. No heroism, no moral accounting, no self-help workaround. Everyone is terminal; the only uncertainty is timing. The subtext is anti-denial. Modern society spends enormous energy laundering death out of view, outsourcing it to institutions and euphemisms. Laing drags it back into the room with a sentence that sounds like it belongs on a warning label.

Context matters: as a psychologist associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, Laing was skeptical of “normality” as a comforting fiction and alert to the ways institutions medicalize discomfort. Here he flips the script: not madness but ordinary life becomes the pathology. It’s a dark joke with a therapeutic edge, less nihilism than an attempt to puncture complacency and force a more honest encounter with finitude.