Patch Adams Quotations

Clowning is a trick to get love close. I can hug 99 percent of people in the first second of contact if I'm in my clown character. The clown assumes your humanity. It assumes that, whatever trauma you've had, you can still love yourself.

I'm looking for a world where love will no longer be extraordinary.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't feel powerless. I know I can do something. But anyone can do something, it's not about being special. It's about deciding to do it - to dive into work for peace and justice and care for everybody on the planet.

At the age of 18, I made up my mind to never have another bad day in my life. I dove into a endless sea of gratitude from which I've never emerged.

I'm a clown, which could be a public health role. I'm really interested in moving our society away from a society needing Xanax and Prozac, and that is really feeling depressed, to one that is celebrating, and so I find just walking around in colorful clothes, people smile.

You've got to know what you want. This is central to acting on your intentions. When you know what you want, you realize that all there is left then is time management. You'll manage your time to achieve your goals because you clearly know what you're trying to achieve in your life.

The role of a clown and a physician are the same - it's to elevate the possible and to relieve suffering.

When you left the house today, you had the intention of putting clothes on and you did. You didn't try to put your pants on today. You simply put them on. The same has to hold for all of our intentions. We don't try to be more loving partners. We make the intention, and we act on it.

I've never made a penny being a doctor, so that makes it not a job. My sense of a doctor is that one is a presence caring for health. So I'm never not a doctor. People call me from all over the world who are hurting, and I care for them. Chatting is what more people want than anything.

If we don't change from a world society that worships money and power to one that worships compassion and generosity, I think we'll be extinct by mid-century. I don't say that as an alarmist or as a pessimist.

I make me. At 18, I decided I wasn't going to have an unconstructed self ever. I was going to be the composer, the designer, the architect of me. It's been really fun.

I'm great at a deathbed. I've never given tranquillisers or psychiatric medicine. I've given love and fun and creativity and passion and hope, and these things ease suffering.

I first came to Russia because of the culture, literature and music... and my interest in the 19th-century revolutionary spirit of Herzen, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Russia is a wonderful place to bring new clowns because Russians give back a wonderful response.

What I really want is a world where no one alive can remember what the word 'war' means. That's my goal.

We are a breathtakingly alienated people... One of my props is the world's largest underpants. I've had the president of Costa Rica in my underpants with me.

Wearing underwear on the outside of your clothes can turn a tedious trip to the store for a forgotten carton of milk into an amusement park romp.

I entered medicine to use it as a vehicle for social change.

It is inexcusable that the richest country in the world does not take care of all of its people. We don't consider ourselves idealistic; we're thoughtfully trying to make a beautiful health care model.

Is letting our children watch TV a form of child abuse? If our children grow up knowing everything about Britney Spears and nothing about nature or faith, about anything, is that not a form of child abuse?

Everyone who goes to a job he doesn't like is a lot weirder than I am.

The medium of response in America is fame; that's how a person that bounces a ball can make millions of dollars, and a school teacher with no fame makes $35,000.

I've taken clowns into the war in Bosnia, the refugee camps of Kosovo, and none of those are any more important than clowning in a subway or an elevator or just walking down the street.

My work is to end violence, and to bring harmony to people,

We love our patients and our patients love us. You don't sue someone you love.

You have a brilliant mind, and like many brilliant people you don't necessarily think the rules apply,

And yet the influence of the adult world--this is the pain paradigm shouting -- serious is what you want to be taken,

they owed something; we wanted them to feel they belonged to something.

They had every reason to be sad and angry, yet people were instantly friendly, engaging and giving.

It's humiliating that a person who kicks a ball makes more money than a school teacher.

They want to have a fabulous listener, they want sweet tenderness and no sense that you are in a hurry,

People like givers, people want to help givers. I get stuff all the time.

All the messages our kids are getting is money-taking, not giving.

We have to end the capitalist system. We have to make love our value. You are rich when you love and you are rich when you are giving away your time and what you have to help other people.

I'm a raging leftist political activist. I've never had a spiritual thought in my life related to God. I'm clear that that's a human invention.

No one ever writes me and says, 'We have a happy hospital'. Nowhere is doing it in a healthy way. That's encouragement for me.

I look at history, there's not a government on the planet I respect. No country in history was ever safe to its women; internet sex is $100 billion a year industry, and 15-20 million men a day have sex with a child in sexual slavery.

It's such a paradox for them to say, "Oh, my God, I've thrown away my life," and continue to do that for the last month of their life. I shake them, physically shake them, and say, "What about now? What about now?"

I am funny, but I'm not about funny... I'm about peace & justice.

We men should be ashamed of ourselves. I think 85 percent of men are dangerous to women. We need to change to a values system nested in compassion and generosity, and women have carried that torch throughout history.

Jump for joy as we accomplish the dreams we adore.

Every human being has an impact on another.

Because we are interested in promoting wellness, we will integrate medicine with performing arts, arts and crafts, agriculture, recreation, nature, and social service.

Faith can have a profound impact on health. It is a very personal experience of thought and surrender, which can comfort in every situation. Faith is free and available to all people at all times. It only requires that one fully embrace possibility, and the ultimate value is in the depth of the embrace.

I think my government are fascists. I feel that if we don't change from a society that worships money and power over to one that worships compassion and generosity, there is no hope for human survival this century.

Please give your life to peace, justice and care.

If you want to change the world, then be your own focus for a celebration of life. Really, fundamentally, at the very core of your being, be thankful you are alive, that you've got this opportunity, with these molecules, at this moment. Be thankful! Be a celebrant! Be thankful that you are alive and then look around to see who else is at the party!

My first reaction was that the adult world was fake and liars and basically worked for money and power. I didn't want to live in that world, so I spent a year, aged 17 to 18, trying to kill myself. I didn't want to live in a world of violence and injustice.

Kindness Day? Kindness Day? Do you suppose if we were kind and enthusiastic for centuries uninterruptedly, that someone would create 'Nasty, Indifferent Day'?

Death. To die. To expire. To pass on. To perish. To peg out. To push up daisies. To push up posies. To become extinct. Curtains, deceased, Demised, departed And defunct. Dead as a doornail. Dead as a herring. Dead as a mutton. Dead as nits. The last breath. Paying a debt to nature. The big sleep. God's way of saying, "Slow down."

I like giving. Doing something for somebody else feels good.

People crave laughter as if it were an essential amino acid.

For most of human history, we lived communally in groups, and it was part of the security and nature of groups to help each other and groom each other.

If you actually are a doctor and admitted it, you'd say, 'I don't cure a huge percentage, I don't have a 50 percent cure rate .. (but) I can have a 100 percent compassion rate,'.

I am a Doctor, but above all else I consider myself an activist for peace, justice and care for all people.

Please live a healthy life - medicine is an imperfect science.

The value of friendship and just deep human contact grows out of giving.

Laughter boosts the immune system and helps the body fight off disease, cancer cells as well as viral, bacterial and other infections. Being happy is the best cure of all diseases!

I love you without knowing how, why, or even from where

Remember laughing? Laughter enhances the blood flow to the body’s extremities and improves cardiovascular function. Laughter releases endorphins and other natural mood elevating and pain-killing chemicals, improves the transfer of oxygen and nutrients to internal organs. Laughter boosts the immune system and helps the body fight off disease, cancer cells as well as viral, bacterial and other infections. Being happy is the best cure of all diseases!

Givers get trust quicker than other people. People trust generous people.

It [The Gesundheit Institute] also won't separate the healing arts. All of them work together - traditional medicine and surgery with acupuncture, homeopathy, etc. We want to make the hospital a place a person can't wait to come to, whether they are working there or being there as a patient. Because we are interested in promoting wellness, we will integrate medicine with performing arts, arts and crafts, agriculture, recreation, nature, and social service. Those are some skeletal parts.

See what no one else sees. See what everyone chooses not to see - out of fear, conformity, or laziness. See the whole world anew each day.

One cannot separate the health of the individual from the health of the community, from the health of the world.

I want to live in a world where people become famous because of their work for peace and justice and care. I want the famous to be inspiring; their lives an example of what every human being has it in them to do - act from love!

Humor is an antidote to all ills

Nature tops the list of potent tranquilizers and stress reducers. The mere sound of moving water has been shown to lower blood pressure.

We can never get a re-creation of community and heal our society without giving our citizens a sense of belonging.

Spread joy. Chase your wildest dreams.

Nothing I study makes me think we will survive this century. And yet why am I so happy? Because it's not too late. Just get off your ass and work for revolution.

When I was a girl I would look out my bedroom window at the caterpillars; I envied them so much. No matter what they were before, no matter what happened to them, they could just hide away and turn into these beautiful creatures that could fly away completely untouched.

When a dream takes hold of you, what can you do? You can run with it, let it run your life, or let it go and think for the rest of your life about what might have been.

If you focus on the problem, you can’t see the solution. Never focus on the problem.

When I hear real faithful people - whether it's a real Christian, or a real Buddhist, or a real Muslim - I hear them use the language I use for a friend. So my metaphor for God is friend.

Excellence in health means devoting your life to ending poverty.

We need to start treating the patient as well as the disease,

For me, spiritual means love in action. So if you are working for love, then you are a spiritual person.

The Gesundheit Institute is a pie in the face of greed - by taking the most expensive thing in America, health care, and giving it away for free.

I'd say that I think the most revolutionary act that you can commit in our society today is to be happy.

The most radical act anyone can commit is to be happy.

Every problem in history is due to men, so I'm basically asking for humanity to nest itself in a feminine culture, probably for the next 1,000 years.

The purpose of a doctor or any human in general should not be to simply delay the death of the patient, but to increase the person's quality of life.

We need each other, deeper than anyone ever dares to admit even to themselves. I think it is a genetic imperative that we huddle together and hold on to each other. There is no question in my mind that there is nothing else in life, really, than friendship.

The reason adults should look as though they are having fun, is to give kids a reason to want to grow up.

I am extremely intentional in making the environment around me playful and loving. I have great skill in that area.

Waiting in line is a great opportunity to meet people, daydream, or play.