Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Thomas Szasz (Hungarian Psychiatrist)

Thomas Stephen Szasz (1920–2012) was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. A controversial psychiatrist, he was a primary figure in the “anti-psychiatry movement.” In his well-known book The Myth of Mental Illness (1961,) he debunked the concept of mental illness and the questionable role of psychiatry overall.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Szasz immigrated to America in 1938, received his M.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 1944, and then specialized in psychiatry and psychoanalysis at the University of Chicago. He served as professor of psychiatry 1956–2012 at State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York.

Szasz wrote many books, most of which contend that all disease must be physical, that, therefore, the idea of ‘mental disease’ is a myth. He also argued that contemporary psychiatrists are the agents of repression.

Szasz had a deep commitment to human freedom. Disparaging any incursions on civil liberties in the name of psychiatry, he argued that people should be allowed to do what they hope for, provided that they do not break the law.

Szasz was a prolific writer who became both famous and controversial. His many publications include The Myth of Mental Illness (1961,) Ideology and Insanity (1970,) The Theology of Medicine (1977,) The Myth of Psychotherapy (1978,) Cruel Compassion (1994,) Faith in Freedom (2004,) and Words to the Wise (2004.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Thomas Szasz

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Creation, Discovery, Self-Discovery, Being Ourselves

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

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

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

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.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Maturity

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

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

Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love.
—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
Topics: Psychiatry

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Authority, One liners

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

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
Topics: Parenting

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

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

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

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

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they make a good excuse.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Excuses

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

In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Madness

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

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

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

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.
—Thomas Szasz

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
Topics: Perfectionism, Maturity, Aging

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

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.
—Thomas Szasz
Topics: Doubt

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: Man, Mankind, Body

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

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: Vanity, Conceit

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