Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed… — Thomas Szasz Copy Share Image
Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist… — 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
