Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad).

Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad). If

Madness is somewhere between chaos and having a dream.

Madness is the acme of intelligence.

For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.

Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.

A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.

... while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.

Madness is an illness of the brain, not of the mind.

Collective madness is called sanity ..

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

Madness breeds madness.

"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.

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.