All Quotes · Page 252

6202 hand-picked quotes from 239 philosophers, writers, and leaders.

Page 252 of 259

“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.”

“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

“Hermione was very easy to create because she is based almost entirely on myself at the age of 11. She is really a caricature of me.”

— J.K. Rowling

“She might even have grown to love him romantically (she certainly loved him as a friend) if he had not loved Dark Magic so much, and been drawn to such loathesome people and acts.”

— J.K. Rowling

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.”

— J.K. Rowling

“I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.”

— J.K. Rowling

“What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters; for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.”

— J.K. Rowling

“That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we…”

— J.K. Rowling

“Lupin’s condition of lycanthropy (being a werewolf) was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS.”

— J.K. Rowling

“The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes.”

— J.K. Rowling

“There is something about a mass of human beings. There's always an edge in a crowd. Always.”

— J.K. Rowling

“What I've tried to show in the Potter books, and what I feel strongly myself, is that we should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain.”

— J.K. Rowling