Mad World Quotes

“I find it kind of funny. I find it kind of sad. The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.”
― Tears for Fears

“All Mad"

'He is mad as a hare, poor fellow,
And should be in chains,' you say,
I haven't a doubt of your statement,
But who isn't mad, I pray?
Why, the world is a great asylum,
And the people are all insane,
Gone daft with pleasure or folly,
Or crazed with passion and pain.

The infant who shrieks at a shadow,
The child with his Santa Claus faith,
The woman who worships Dame Fashion,
Each man with his notions of death,
The miser who hoards up his earnings,
The spendthrift who wastes them too soon,
The scholar grown blind in his delving,
The lover who stares at the moon.

The poet who thinks life a paean,
The cynic who thinks it a fraud,
The youth who goes seeking for pleasure,
The preacher who dares talk of God,
All priests with their creeds and their croaking,
All doubters who dare to deny,
The gay who find aught to wake laughter,
The sad who find aught worth a sigh,
Whoever is downcast or solemn,
Whoever is gleeful and gay,
Are only the dupes of delusions—
We are all of us—all of us mad.”
― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“I had to admit, sometimes I sensed the strangeness of the world tugging at my sleeve, like a mischievous toddler, and I wanted to follow it.”
― Troy H. Gardner, Wakefield

“Michael [Hutchence] is hands down one of the greatest frontmen in music. The style, the voice—all of it. Any way that I was ever influenced by him really comes down to small, pale imitations compared to the real thing. There is a fearlessness about him. Watching him at Wembley Stadium with 70,000 people, he looks as comfortable as if he were in his own living room.”
― Lori Majewski, Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s

“Unhinging reason temporarily can sometimes be the only rational response to an insane world.”
― Stewart Stafford

“We arrived and we thought, 'This is our time. This is our generation. We have a responsibility.' " @garyjkemp of Spandau Ballet in "Mad World: An Oral History of the New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s”
― Lori Majewski, Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s

“Normalcy has taken leave of the galaxy.”
― James Luceno, Star Wars: Catalyst - A Rogue One Novel

“Pappou did not look at Lexi. He scratched his nose and swung his komboloi in one hand so that the worry beads clacked against each other like tiny firecrackers, as if he hoped the clicking of them would snap the world back to its senses, knowing also that they couldn't.”
― Angela Panayotopulos

“James Connolly (1868-1916), an Irish republican and socialist leader who a British firing squad executed for his role in the Easter Rising said that there is no conscience in warfare. ''It would be well to realize that all the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare,’ of the ‘rules of civilized warfare,’ and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race is hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress…What a lover of humanity can view with anything but horror this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Are the coffins of love being made
And we are all becoming machines
In this world of madness?”
― Neelam Saxena Chandra, the lost mint taste

“Is anyone really happy in this mad world?”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Blythes Are Quoted