Thomas Szasz

(407 votes)   All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.

Thomas Szasz

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(363 votes)   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, but not through friendship.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(255 votes)   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 hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients -- as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement; it is immensely profitable for the analysts -- as are all forms pandering to people's vanity; and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient's life.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(253 votes)   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
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(231 votes)   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 decency from a person who mistreats himself.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(188 votes)   Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual’s body.

Thomas Szasz

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(186 votes)   We achieve ''active'' mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(180 votes)   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 sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose, or, better still, jump in the water and swim for the shore.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(171 votes)   Some people say they haven't yet found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(134 votes)   In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(130 votes)   Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(129 votes)   If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(118 votes)   Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condenses and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(114 votes)   We often speak of love when we really should be speaking of the drive to dominate or to master, so as to confirm ourselves as active agents, in control of our own destinies and worthy of respect from others.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(113 votes)   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 intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

Thomas Szasz
1920-, American Psychiatrist

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website