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Thomas Szasz QUOTES

Thomas Szasz QUOTES

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

― Thomas Szasz

2 " 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

3 " Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. "

― Thomas Szasz

4 " 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

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

― Thomas Szasz

6 " 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

7 " 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 , Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

8 " 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

9 " 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 Second Sin

10 " 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 , Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

11 " 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 , Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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 , The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary

15 " 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

16 " 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 , Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers

17 " 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 , Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " 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