Thomas Szasz Quotes

1920 – 2012

Hungarian-American psychiatrist and author of "The Myth of Mental Illness".

24 quotesAbout Thomas Szasz on Wikipedia

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

— Thomas Szasz

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

— Thomas Szasz

“Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you.”

— Thomas Szasz

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

— Thomas Szasz

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

— Thomas Szasz

“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”

— Thomas Szasz

“Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people.”

— Thomas Szasz

“If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”

— Thomas Szasz

“Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments.”

— Thomas Szasz

“In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.”

— Thomas Szasz

“Drugs are inert chemicals that have no effect on human beings who choose not to use them.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest.”

— Thomas Szasz

“Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master.”

— 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…”

— Thomas Szasz

“The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility.”

— Thomas Szasz

“People, especially liberals and psychiatrists, say that the two main causes of crime are mental illness and poverty. Insanity is therefore a defense in the criminal law.”

— 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

“Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.”

— Thomas Szasz

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

— Thomas Szasz

“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…”

— Thomas Szasz

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