Man cannot long survive without air, water, and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude. — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Traditionally, sex has been a very private, secretive activity. Herein perhaps lies its powerful force for uniting people in a strong bond.… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth) so that the madman can always… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe… — 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… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject,… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Men often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, actually, the boat is… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women can experience… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby… — 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
![“Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear - particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the…” quote by Thomas Szasz](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/d63/thomas-szasz-3801_confused_like-karl-kraus-wittgenstein-was-seldom_2910084.jpg)
