Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
A person cannot make another happy, but he can make him unhappy. This is the main reason why there is more unhappiness… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal. — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other… — 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
The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions in his society, the more he must trust those who… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
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
The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against that… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
When the psychiatrist approves of a person's actions, he judges that person to have acted with "free choice"; when he disapproves,he judges… — 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
The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is desirable. It only means that society does not have… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed… — 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
