Thomas Szasz Quotes

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

Happiness is ... usually attributed by adults to children and by children to adults.

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the de...

The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The forme...

Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to rende...

The self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is n...

We cannot institutionalize helping the "victims" of personal disasters.

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, f...

If we regard the state as the father, and the citizens as children, there are three alternatives. Fi...

Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise conc...

It is mainly by resisting authority that the individual defines himself. This is why authorities--wh...

Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared an appreciation of this important insight, this painful truth--tha...

The sense of national emergency engendered by war transforms the destruction of dissident opinion in...

The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal America...

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as...

Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation...

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

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

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about pers...

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

No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological conditio...

When and why do we attribute a person's behavior to brain disease, and when and why do we not do so?...

He who does not want to understand the Other has no right to say that what the Other does or says ma...

Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of us...

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. T...

Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst considered to...

Thousands of years ago--in times we are fond of calling "primitive" (since this renders us "modern" ...

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

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

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something o...

The proverb warns that "You should not bite the hand that feeds you." But maybe you should if it p...

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attr...

Honoring the value of competence and steadfastness requires a generosity of spirit and a curbing of ...

Men often have grievances against prominent and powerful persons. Historically, the grievances of th...

A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal ...

The principal differences between law and science are as follows:1. In the administration of the law...

In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never becau...

Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living and a psychot...

If a man loses his money through unwise market speculation or by playing the horses, he has been pun...

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

Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because...

There are two kinds of 'disabled' persons: Those who dwell on what they have lost and those who conc...

Our legal system does not grant adults a right to liberty, because they already possess that right; ...

Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation from others, and thus affords...

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

The proverb warns that "You should not bite that hand that feeds you." But maybe you should if it p...

Once a person has made some sort of stable, symbolic connection between two things, the connection w...

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in...

The proverb warns that, 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it p...

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (...

It is the lot of mankind to feel not only insecure but also bored. To combat that experience, people...

The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give suff...

Modern Western democracies no longer engage in such despotic assaults on freedom, Instead, they depr...

The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them ...

The cruelty intrinsic to the workhouse system was excused by the need to discourage idleness, much a...