Who said “The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road…”?

“In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.”

“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, epochs it is the rule.”

“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”

“And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”

“In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!”

“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.”

“What's important is promising something to the people, not actually keeping those promises. The people have always lived on hope alone.”

“No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.”