Beckett: You're mad!
Jack: Thank goodness for that, 'cause if I wasn't this would probably never work.
"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible!"
— Daffy Duck, riding an invisible bicycle in an early Looney Tunes short
"In an hour of Darkness a blind man is the best guide. In an age of Insanity look to the madman to lead the way."
— Imperial maxim, Warhammer 40,000
"Only the insane have strength enough to prosper; only those that prosper may judge what is truly sane."
— Imperial maxim, Warhammer 40,000
"Sanity is for the Weak!"
— Chaos credo, Warhammer 40,000
"The mad can survive what sanity says is suicide."
The moment their arms spun freely in our air, they were doomed—for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane.
—xkcd #556: Alternative Energy Revolution
(alt text)
(alt text)Nothing turned, say, a slightly talented musician into a towering genius faster than the problem of encroaching deafness, and nothing turned a perfectly normal, healthy individual into a great military or political leader better than irreversible brain damage.
For the first time she saw its eyes. They were red, and mad as hell. Anything with eyes like that could kill anything it wanted, because madness, true madness, can drive a fist through a plank.
Sanity is overrated.
— Unattributed
That we’re monsters. In her eyes, our trigger events highlight a moment at the worst point of our lives and our powers make it so we can never put that behind us. Good guy or bad, she sees us as walking personifications of whatever issues drove us to get our powers in the first place, inflicting some shadow or abstract representation of those traumas on others with our powers.
— Tattletale explains this trope, Worm
Beyond pain, beyond obsession and wild despair, there lies a place of twisted power only the most tormented souls can reach.
— Flavor Text, In Garruk's Wake, Magic: The Gathering
One side effect of the strength of her madness is that Malakai is immensely powerful, though her true power manifests only in times of great distress. Far beyond run-of-the-mill Dementation, Malakai's delusions are strong enough that she can warp minds, physical objects and bodies (human or otherwise) as if they were one. When she feels threatened, whether by real or imagined foes, the world twists around her, often by a storm of supernatural intensity, complete with winds, lightning, hail or rain, and - should she be truly frightened - warping buildings, exploding people and nearly anything else your freakish mind can imagine.
— Vampire: The Masquerade - Gehenna
Even the feeblest existence can gain tremendous power once the chains on its heart are broken. You'd better not underestimate these two.
— The Traitor, Persona 5
"Mr. Winthrop, three-quarters of my family have fallen into madness, and in their madness have acquired a, a superhuman strength... so that it took the power of many to subdue them."
—Roderick Usher, House of Usher
