Stupidity will keep you from going insane

Print of the McLean Asylum in 1853, then in Somerville, Mass. It moved to Belmont, Mass., in 1894. Founded in 1811, the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital remains among the world’s most important private mental hospitals, encompassing extensive treatment and research.

"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad."

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894), Boston-based physician, poet, professor and polymath