The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else. — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
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
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
Autonomy... is freedom to develop one's self - to increase one's knowledge, improve one's skills, and achieve responsibility for one's conduct. And… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
After generations of living under medical tutelage, which provides us with protection (albeit illusory) against "dangerous drugs", we have failed to cultivate… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to… — 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
It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are… — 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
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)
