“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, The Manufacture of Madness (1997), p. 167

About Thomas Szasz

1920 – 2012

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

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

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

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

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?”

“In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.”

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.”

“That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within.”

“Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason.”