Best Thomas Szasz Quotes
- Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom… Adolescents
- I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation… Absurd
- Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a… Afraid
- Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in… Acts
- The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories. Basic
- What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort, or esteem, but games worth playing Comfort
- The battle for the world is the battle for definitions. Battle
- Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected American Society within the last fifty years. Affected
- We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living. Irresponsible
- Men often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and… Anyone
- Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations. Bitter
- The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis. Jobs
- The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women can experience it through fornication,… Cohabitation
- Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the… Age
- 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 only when the… Abandoning
- Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood… Abetted
- Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which may be why they don't work here on Earth. Earth
- Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding. Hence the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of… Affair
- The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. Apology
- Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. Clear
- If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. Cynical
- Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of… Act
- It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If… Considered
- Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to… Among
- Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. Attitude