Szasz Quotes & Sayings

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

We cannot institutionalize helping the "victims" of personal disasters. — Thomas Szasz

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. — Thomas Szasz

It is the lot of mankind to feel not only insecure but also bored. To combat that experience, people long to be passively entertained, which requires less effort than assuming responsibility for self-improvement. — Thomas Szasz

It seems to me that-at least in our scientific theories of behavior-we have failed to accept the simple fact that human relations are inherently fraught with difficulties and that to make them even relatively harmonious requires much patience and hard work. — Thomas Szasz

As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters. — Thomas Szasz

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

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 control of our own destinies and worthy of respect from others. — Thomas Szasz

Once a person has made some sort of stable, symbolic connection between two things, the connection will influence his subsequent behavior and will generate its own 'proof.' This is why it is idle and foolish to try to 'refute' religious, political, and similar beliefs with empirical arguments about referents that are symbols to the believer but not to the non-believer. — Thomas Szasz

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

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. — Thomas Szasz

The judge punishes lawbreakers as a burning house injures its occupants. A person may be burned to death while robbing a home or saving a friend. Similarly, from a moral point of view, the judge's work is good or evil, depending on whether the laws he enforces are good or evil. — Thomas Szasz

Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere, by force, with a persons decision to commit this act. The result is a far-reaching infantilization and dehumanization of the suicidal person. — Thomas Szasz

The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them in the role of mental patient,and against psychiatrists whose livelihood depends on defining them as mentally ill. — Thomas Szasz

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. — Thomas Szasz

'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing. — Thomas Szasz

Like Karl Kraus, [Wittgenstein] was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception. — Thomas Szasz

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

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

Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession . It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself ... in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role. — Thomas Szasz

If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes. — Thomas Szasz

Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished. — Thomas Szasz

Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous. — Thomas Szasz

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

Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic "causes" of these "conditions"? — Thomas Szasz

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

The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing. — Thomas Szasz

It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority's falsehood as truth, could be fatal. — Thomas Szasz

The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis. — Thomas Szasz

The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms. — Thomas Szasz

In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy. — Thomas Szasz

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. — Thomas Szasz

I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in the condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male. — Thomas Szasz

There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that alter their feelings and thoughts and the traditional persecution of men for their religion ... What all of these persecutions have in common is that the victims are harassed by the majority not because they engage in overtly aggressive or destructive acts, ... but because their conduct or appearance offends a group intolerant to and threatened by human differences. — Thomas Szasz

Thousands of years ago
in times we are fond of calling "primitive" (since this renders us "modern" without having to exert ourselves further to earn this qualification) ... — Thomas Szasz

For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club. — Thomas Szasz

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

It is mainly by resisting authority that the individual defines himself. This is why authorities
whether parental, priestly, political, or psychiatric
must be careful how and where they assert themselves; for while it is true that the more they assert themselves the more they govern, it is also true that the more they assert themselves the more opportunities they offer for being successfully denied. — Thomas Szasz

Sex is a body-contact sport. It is safe to watch but more fun to play. — Thomas Szasz

People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend upon them. Since they cannot do that, people choose to make the powerful virtuous, glorifying in becoming victimized by them. — Thomas Szasz

Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding. Hence the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of reason in human affairs. — Thomas Szasz

If we regard the state as the father, and the citizens as children, there are three alternatives. First, the father may be bad and despotic:this, most people will agree, was the case in Czarist Russia. Second, the father may be good, but somewhat tyrannical; this is the way the Communist governments in Russia and China picture themselves. Third, the father may not act as a father at all, for the children have grown up, and there is mutual respect among them. All are now governed by the same rules of behavior (laws): this is the Anglo-American concept of nonpaternalistic humanism and liberty under law. — Thomas Szasz

Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society. — Thomas Szasz

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

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. — Thomas Szasz

Autonomy ... is freedom to develop one's self - to increase one's knowledge, improve one's skills, and achieve responsibility for one's conduct. And it is freedom to lead one's own life, to choose among alternative courses of action so long as no injury to others results. — Thomas Szasz

The great shift ... is the movement away from the value-laden languages of ... the "humanities," and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the "sciences." This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is ... especially important in psychology ... and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen. — Thomas Szasz

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

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. — Thomas Szasz

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography. — Thomas Szasz

Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations. — Thomas Szasz

What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort, or esteem, but games worth playing — Thomas Szasz

If a man loses his money through unwise market speculation or by playing the horses, he has been punished in a manner which we may call passive. By this I mean that another person has not taken special, socially overt steps to harm the "offender." This phenomenon has not received the attention it deserves. — Thomas Szasz

If someone does something we disapprove of, we regard him as bad if we believe we can deter him from persisting in his conduct, but we regard him as mad if we believe we cannot. — Thomas Szasz

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. — Thomas Szasz

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power. — Thomas Szasz

Institutions, no less than persons, may need to be socialized. — Thomas Szasz

The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions in his society, the more he must trust those who wield power in it; and the more he trusts those who wield such power, the more vulnerable he makes himself to becoming their victim. — Thomas Szasz

Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around. — Thomas Szasz

The language of science - and especially of a science of man - is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity. — Thomas Szasz

Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults. — Thomas Szasz

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. — Thomas Szasz

As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen. — Thomas Szasz

If you have strongly held opinions, you are opinionated; if you don't, you lack conviction: either way, there is something wrong with you. — Thomas Szasz

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. — Thomas Szasz

When the psychiatrist approves of a person's actions, he judges that person to have acted with "free choice"; when he disapproves,he judges him to have acted without "free choice." It is small wonder that people find "free choice" a confusing idea: "free choice" appears to refer to what the person being judged (often called the "patient") does, whereas it is actually what the person making the judgment (often a psychiatrist or other mental health worker) thinks. — Thomas Szasz

Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish. — Thomas Szasz

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. — Thomas Szasz

'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy; what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it. — Thomas Szasz

Mental illness, of course, is not literally a 'thing' - or physical object - and hence it can 'exist' only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. — Thomas Szasz

Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared an appreciation of this important insight, this painful truth
that the state wants men to be weak and timid, not strong and proud. — Thomas Szasz

Why don't you have a right to say you are Jesus? And why isn't the proper response to that "congratulations"? — Thomas Szasz

Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected American Society within the last fifty years. — Thomas Szasz

We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today. — Thomas Szasz

How can depression be real if our eyes arent real? — Thomas Szasz

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; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. — Thomas Szasz

In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery ... Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines "buggery" as "heresy, sodomy. — Thomas Szasz

Scientific knowledge does not contain within itself directions for its humanitarian use. — Thomas Szasz

When and why do we attribute a person's behavior to brain disease, and when and why do we not do so? Briefly, the answer is that we often attribute bad behavior to disease (to excuse the agent);never attribute good behavior to disease (lest we deprive the agent of credit); and typically attribute good behavior to free will and insist bad behavior called mental illness is a "no fault" act of nature. — Thomas Szasz

The cruelty intrinsic to the workhouse system was excused by the need to discourage idleness, much as the malice intrinsic to the mental hospital system has been excused by the need to provide treatment. — Thomas Szasz

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. — Thomas Szasz

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. — Thomas Szasz

He who forgiveth, and is reconciled unto his enemy,
shall receive his reward from God; for he loveth not the unjust doers. — Thomas Szasz

Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression. — Thomas Szasz

The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr. — Thomas Szasz

Like fast-food chains, child psychiatric inpatient units and the wholesale psychiatric drugging of children, in and out of hospitals, are recent ... and remarkably popular products and practices. — Thomas Szasz

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people. — Thomas Szasz

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications. — Thomas Szasz

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds. — Thomas Szasz

No one attacks loose-thinking and folly with half the precision and zest of Thomas Szasz. — John Leo

A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result has been the aggrandizement of psychiatry. The value to the legal profession and to society as a whole of psychiatric help in administering the criminal law, is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps society has been injured, rather than helped, by the furor psychodiagnosticus and psychotherapeuticus in criminology which it invited, fostered, and tolerated. — Thomas Szasz

Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine. — Thomas Szasz

Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love. — Thomas Szasz

Men often have grievances against prominent and powerful persons. Historically, the grievances of the powerless against the powerful have furnished the steam for the engines of revolutions. My point is that in many of the famous medicolegal cases involving the issue of insanity, persons of relatively low social rank openly attacked their superiors. Perhaps their grievances were real and justified, and were vented on the contemporary social symbols of authority, the King and the Queen. Whether or not these grievances justified homicide is not our problem here. I merely wish to suggest that the issue of insanity may have been raised in these trials to obscure the social problems which the crimes intended to dramatize. — Thomas Szasz

Neither he [Ferenczi] nor Freud believed that a person should be exempted from legal punishment
or worse, that he should be punished by compulsory psychiatric "treatments"
because of psychoanalytic information about him. In the light of current thought, this is a startling and sobering fact. — Thomas Szasz

I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it to the category of pseudo-science. — Thomas Szasz

We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living. — Thomas Szasz

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc. — Thomas Szasz

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

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