TSThomas Szasz

55 collected words

Thomas Szasz

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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

Thomas Szasz / quote

02Undated

Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.

Thomas Szasz / quote

03Undated

Thousands of years ago--in times we are fond of calling "primitive" (since this renders us "modern" without having to exert ourselves further to earn this qualification)...

Thomas Szasz / quote

04Undated

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.

Thomas Szasz / quote

05Undated

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.

Thomas Szasz / quote

06Undated

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

Thomas Szasz / quote

07Undated

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.

Thomas Szasz / quote

08Undated

It is the lot of mankind to feel not only insecure but also bored. To combat that experience, people long to be passively entertained, which requires less effort than assuming responsibility for self-improvement.

Thomas Szasz / quote

09Undated

Once a person has made some sort of stable, symbolic connection between two things, the connection will influence his subsequent behavior and will generate its own 'proof.' This is why it is idle and foolish to try to 'refute' religious, political, and similar beliefs with empirical arguments about referents that are symbols to the believer but not to the non-believer.

Thomas Szasz / quote

10Undated

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 / quote

11Undated

The cruelty intrinsic to the workhouse system was excused by the need to discourage idleness, much as the malice intrinsic to the mental hospital system has been excused by the need to provide treatment.

Thomas Szasz / quote

12Undated

He who does not want to understand the Other has no right to say that what the Other does or says makes no sense.

Thomas Szasz / quote

13Undated

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 a meaningful individual responsibility.

Thomas Szasz / quote

14Undated

Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot--despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists--be both.

Thomas Szasz / quote

15Undated

The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing. To prove their point — and to capitalize on their self-destructive and destructive behavior — smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and insanity acquitees are suing tobacco companies, liquor companies, gambling casinos, and physicians.

Thomas Szasz / quote

16Undated

There are two kinds of 'disabled' persons: Those who dwell on what they have lost and those who concentrate on what they have left.

Thomas Szasz / quote

17Undated

Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of using phrases such as "housing the homeless" and "treating the mentally ill" as if we knew what counts as housing a homeless person or what it means to treat mental illness. But we do not. We have deceived ourselves that having a home and being mentally healthy are our natural conditions, and that we become homeless or mentally ill as a result of "losing" our homes or our minds. The opposite is the case. We are born without a home and without reason, and have to exert ourselves and are fortunate if we succeed in building a secure home and a sound mind.

Thomas Szasz / quote

18Undated

Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation from others, and thus affords them the possibility of dignity. They loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, and thus confronts them with the possibility of insignificance.

Thomas Szasz / quote

19Undated

Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared an appreciation of this important insight, this painful truth--that the state wants men to be weak and timid, not strong and proud.

Thomas Szasz / quote

20Undated

It is mainly by resisting authority that the individual defines himself. This is why authorities--whether parental, priestly, political, or psychiatric--must be careful how and where they assert themselves; for while it is true that the more they assert themselves the more they govern, it is also true that the more they assert themselves the more opportunities they offer for being successfully denied.

Thomas Szasz / quote

21Undated

If we regard the state as the father, and the citizens as children, there are three alternatives. First, the father may be bad and despotic:this, most people will agree, was the case in Czarist Russia. Second, the father may be good, but somewhat tyrannical; this is the way the Communist governments in Russia and China picture themselves. Third, the father may not act as a father at all, for the children have grown up, and there is mutual respect among them. All are now governed by the same rules of behavior (laws): this is the Anglo-American concept of nonpaternalistic humanism and liberty under law.

Thomas Szasz / quote

22Undated

Modern Western democracies no longer engage in such despotic assaults on freedom, Instead, they deprive people of liberty indirectly, by relieving them of responsibility for their own (allegedly self-injurious) actions and calling the intervention "treatment.

Thomas Szasz / quote

23Undated

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help? However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder--in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes.

Thomas Szasz / quote

24Undated

Our legal system does not grant adults a right to liberty, because they already possess that right; it only revokes the right to liberty (for certain offenses) or restores it (if the deprivation did not conform to due process).

Thomas Szasz / quote