Chains Quote by Thomas Szasz

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

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

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

The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.

— Thomas Szasz

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

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

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

He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.

— Thomas Szasz

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

— Thomas Szasz

We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living.

— Thomas Szasz

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

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