Szasz Quotes

#1. No one attacks loose-thinking and folly with half the precision and zest of Thomas Szasz.

John Leo

#2. 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

Thomas Szasz

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

Thomas Szasz

#4. 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

#5. 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.

Thomas Szasz

#6. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#8. 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

#9. 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.

Thomas Szasz

#10. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#12. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#14. Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

Thomas Szasz

#15. The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no "controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens.

Thomas Szasz

#16. The War on Drugs and the War on Homelessness are on a collision course that no one in the media or in public life are willing to acknowledge. Ostensibly aimed at decreasing the use of illegal drugs, the War on Drugs succeeds only in increasing homelessness.

Thomas Szasz

#17. Anyone who seeks to help others - whether by means of religion or by means of medicine - must eschew the use of force.

Thomas Szasz

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

Thomas Szasz

#19. By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

Thomas Szasz

#20. 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

#21. In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.

Thomas Szasz

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

Thomas Szasz

#23. So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth) so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.

Thomas Szasz

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

Thomas Szasz

#25. Scientific knowledge does not contain within itself directions for its humanitarian use.

Thomas Szasz

#26. 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

#27. Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.

Thomas Szasz

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#31. He who does not want to understand the Other has no right to say that what the Other does or says makes no sense.

Thomas Szasz

#32. Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.

Thomas Szasz

#33. Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.

Thomas Szasz

#34. The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.

Thomas Szasz

#35. What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort, or esteem, but games worth playing

Thomas Szasz

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#39. Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which may be why they don't work here on Earth.

Thomas Szasz

#40. The sense of national emergency engendered by war transforms the destruction of dissident opinion into patriotism.

Thomas Szasz

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.

Thomas Szasz

#44. A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

Thomas Szasz

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

Thomas Szasz

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to protect and promote the patient's mental health. The latter rejects absolute power, regardless of its aim or use.

Thomas Szasz

#49. Why don't you have a right to say you are Jesus? And why isn't the proper response to that "congratulations"?

Thomas Szasz

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

Thomas Szasz

#51. We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living.

Thomas Szasz

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

Thomas Szasz

#53. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#55. Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.

Thomas Szasz

#56. A person cannot make another happy, but he can make him unhappy. This is the main reason why there is more unhappiness than happiness in the world.

Thomas Szasz

#57. 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

#58. How can depression be real if our eyes arent real?

Thomas Szasz

#59. I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.

Thomas Szasz

#60. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#62. Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.

Thomas Szasz

#63. The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.

Thomas Szasz

#64. 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 vast falsehood.

Thomas Szasz

#65. The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.

Thomas Szasz

#66. There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.

Thomas Szasz

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#72. 'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.

Thomas Szasz

#73. 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

#74. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#76. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. After generations of living under medical tutelage, which provides us with protection (albeit illusory) against "dangerous drugs", we have failed to cultivate the self-reliance and self-discipline we must possess as competent adults surrounded by the fruits of our pharmacological-technological age.

Thomas Szasz

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. 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

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

Thomas Szasz

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. The maliciousness of psychiatry is that it promotes itself as a medical discipline, although it is actually only part of the state authority.24 Therein

Thomas Szasz

#91. 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

#92. Sex is a body-contact sport. It is safe to watch but more fun to play.

Thomas Szasz

#93. Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot
despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists
be both.

Thomas Szasz

#94. Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.

Thomas Szasz

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

Thomas Szasz

#96. Our legal system does not grant adults a right to liberty, because they already possess that right; it only revokes the right to liberty (for certain offenses) or restores it (if the deprivation did not conform to due process).

Thomas Szasz

#97. 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.

Thomas Szasz

#98. Delusion: belief said to be false by someone who does not share it.

Thomas Szasz

#99. Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

Thomas Szasz

#100. Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.

Thomas Szasz