Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure. — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish. — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
The disease concept of homosexuality as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories. — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity.… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself. — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds. — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living. — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
We have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
