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.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Security
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.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Duty
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
Topics: Love
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
Topics: Mental Illness
Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
—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
Topics: Justice
If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Madness
There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Autobiography
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
Topics: Psychiatry
The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.
—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
Topics: Work
Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that very poor and very rich adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can “do” drugs, “have” sex, “make” babies, and “get” money (from their parents, crime, or the State). For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Responsibility
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
Topics: Education, Learning
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
Topics: Punishment
In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.
—Thomas Szasz
Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love.
—Thomas Szasz
Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Psychiatry
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
Topics: Psychiatry
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
Topics: Psychiatry
He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Suicide
In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Madness
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.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Psychiatry
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.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Body, Man, Mankind
When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
—Thomas Szasz
Man cannot survive without air, water and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Solitude
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
Topics: Conceit, Vanity
The system isn’t stupid, but the people in it are.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Organization
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
Topics: Respect
If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
—Thomas Szasz
Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.
—Thomas Szasz
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- William Glasser American Psychiatrist
- Karl Menninger American Psychiatrist
- David Viscott American Psychiatrist
- M. Scott Peck American Psychiatrist
- Theodore Isaac Rubin American Psychiatrist, Author
- R. D. Laing British Psychiatrist
- George Soros Hungarian-American Investor
- Harry Houdini Hungarian-born American Magician
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- William Graham Sumner American Polymath
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