Thomas Szasz Quotes (50 Quotes)

It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.

Men often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and decency from a person who mistreats himself.

The many faces of intimacy the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation contemporary men and women can experience it through fornication, but not through friendship.

Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.

Masturbation the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease in the twentieth, it's a cure.

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.

We often speak of love when we really should be speaking of the drive to dominate or to master, so as to confirm ourselves as active agents, in controlof our own destinies and worthy of respect from others.

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic --in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea --known to medical science is work.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.

Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.

Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric each condenses and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.

The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.

Since the Freudian revolution, and especially since the Second World War, the secret formula has been this If you want to debase what a person is doing, call his act psychopathological and call him mentally ill if you want to exalt what a person is

Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.

The self is not something that one finds, it is something that one creates.

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.

If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

Had the white settlers in North America called the natives 'Americans' instead of 'Indians', the early Americans could not have said that the 'only good Indian is a dead Indian' and could not have deprived them so easily of their lands and lands and lives. Robbing people of their proper names is often the first step in robbing them of their property, liberty, and life.

Traditionally, sex has been a very private, secretive activity. Herein perhaps lies its powerful force for uniting people in a strong bond. As we make sex less secretive, we may rob it of its power to hold men and women together.

Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.

Knowledge is gained by learning trust by doubt skill by practice and love by love.

He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.

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

Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.

No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.

Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it.

Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose, or, better still, jump in the water and swim for the shore.

Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients -- as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement it is immensely profitable for the analysts -- as are all forms pandering to people's vanity and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient's life.

Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit.--

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.

The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.

We achieve ''active'' mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

Whenever masses of people, especially educated people, know something- and when what they know is something they greatly fear because they believe it affects virtually everything they do or want to do - then most likely we stand in the presence of a

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.