Thomas Szasz Quotes

116 Sourced Quotes

Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.

Thomas Szasz
The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.

Thomas Szasz
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 patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.

Thomas Szasz
People, especially liberals and psychiatrists, say that the two main causes of crime are mental illness and poverty. Insanity is therefore a defense in the criminal law. If we really believed that poverty caused crime, we would have a "poverty defense" as well, attorneys calling professors of economics to testify in court whether a particular defendant is guilty of theft or not by reason of poverty.

Thomas Szasz
Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit.

Thomas Szasz
The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, Jewish problem was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; drug-abuse problem is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.

Thomas Szasz
The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.

Thomas Szasz
A teacher should have maximal authority and minimal power.

Thomas Szasz
The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no "controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens.

Thomas Szasz
In the natural sciences, language (mathematics) is a useful tool: like the microscope or telescope, it enables us to see what is otherwise invisible. In the social sciences, language (literalized metaphor) is an impediment: like a distorting mirror, it prevents us from seeing the obvious.
That is why in the natural sciences, knowledge can be gained only with the mastery of their special languages; whereas in human affairs, knowledge can be gained only by rejecting the pretentious jargons of the social sciences.

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

Thomas Szasz
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.

Thomas Szasz
For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation—excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing—was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion.... With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization.

Thomas Szasz
The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.

Thomas Szasz
The treatment can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual.

Thomas Szasz
My contention is that the psychiatric perspective on homosexuality is but a thinly disguised replica of the religious perspective which it displaced, and that efforts to treat this kind of conduct medically are but thinly disguised methods for suppressing it.

Thomas Szasz
The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.

Thomas Szasz
Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacracy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors.

Thomas Szasz
How men hate waiting while their wives shop for clothes and trinkets; how women hate waiting, often for much of their lives, while their husbands shop for fame and glory.

Thomas Szasz
It becomes logical to ask where the idea originates that the rules of the game of life ought to be such that those who are weak, disabled or ill should be helped?
One answer is obvious: this is the game typically played in childhood. Every one of us was, at one time, a weak and helpless child, cared for by adults: without such help we would not have survived and become adults.
Another, almost equally obvious answer is that the prescription of a help-giving attitude toward the weak is embodied in the dominant religions of Western man.
Judaism, and especially Christianity, teach these rules by means of parable and prohibition, example and exhortation, and by every other means available to their representatives.

Thomas Szasz
In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

Thomas Szasz
I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice... Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.

Thomas Szasz
Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance.

Thomas Szasz
There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that alter their feelings and thoughts—and the traditional persecution of men for their religion. … What all of these persecutions have in common is that the victims are harassed by the majority not because they engage in overtly aggressive or destructive acts, … but because their conduct or appearance offends a group intolerant to and threatened by human differences.

Thomas Szasz
Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere, by force, with a persons decision to commit this act. The result is a far-reaching infantilization and dehumanization of the suicidal person.

Thomas Szasz