Thomas Szasz Short Quotes

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Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

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

Thomas Szasz
Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.

Thomas Szasz
Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

Thomas Szasz
Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.

Thomas Szasz
In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.

Thomas Szasz
There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

Thomas Szasz
Sex is a body-contact sport. It is safe to watch but more fun to play.

Thomas Szasz
We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

Thomas Szasz
When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.

Thomas Szasz
Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love.

Thomas Szasz
Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

Thomas Szasz
As the internal-combustion engine runs on gasoline, so the person runs on self-esteem.

Thomas Szasz
Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which may be why they don't work here on Earth.

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

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

Thomas Szasz
Know your enemies: avoid them if you can; intimidate them, if you can't; subdue them, if you must.

Thomas Szasz
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.

Thomas Szasz
The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.

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
The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

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

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 poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.

Thomas Szasz
Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.

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

Thomas Szasz
What had been drapetomania became depression.... Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.

Thomas Szasz
Man cannot long survive without air, water, and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.

Thomas Szasz
Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people.

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

Thomas Szasz