Thomas Szasz: Trending quotes

“As Justice Olive Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, censorship rests on the idea that “every idea is an incitement.” Perhaps he should have specified “every interesting idea,” for a dull idea is not. By the same token, every interesting drug is an incitement. And so is everything else that people find interesting.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: Our Right to Drugs (1992), p. 35.

People , Justice , Idea

“It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living.
I have argued that, today, the notion of a person "having a mental illness" is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization — namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases.
Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest.”

Thomas Szasz

Conclusions.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

Disease , Problem , Study , Personality

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

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 169.

“Prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession.”

Thomas Szasz

It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself … in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.
Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 45.

World

“Psychiatry is institutionalized scientism: it is the systematic imitation, impersonation, counterfeiting, and deception. This is the formula: every adult smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc.); hence, to prove that he is an adult, the adolescent smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc). Mutatis mutandis: every science consists of classification, control, and prediction; hence to prove psychiatry is a science, the psychiatrist classifies, controls, predicts. The result is that he classifies people as mad; that he confines them as dangerous (to themselves or others); and that he predicts people's behavior, robbing them of their free will and hence of their very humanity.”

Thomas Szasz

"Science and Scientism", p. 115.
The Second Sin (1973)

People , Behavior , Drink , Science

“This connection, at once semantic and conceptual, between unorthodoxy and sodomy, was firmly established during the late Middle Ages, and has never been severed. It is as strong today as it was six hundred years ago. To be stigmatized as a heretic or bugger in the fourteenth century was to cast out of society. Since the dominant ideology was theological, religious deviance was considered so grave an offense as to render the individual a nonperson. Whatever redeeming qualities he might have had counted for naught. The sin of heresy eclipsed all contradictory, personal characteristics, just as the teachings of God and the Church eclipsed all contradictory empirical observations. The disease called “mental illness”—and its subspecies “homosexuality”—plays the same role today.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 166.

God , Age , Disease , Strong

“The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 44.

Science

“Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions?””

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 102.

Disease , Communication

“Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 172.

“By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 167.

Nature , Time , Personality

“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

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 49.

People , Personality

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

Thomas Szasz

"Drugs", p. 63.
The Second Sin (1973)

People , Religion

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

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Second Sin (1973), P. 49.

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

Thomas Szasz

Time , Personality

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”

Thomas Szasz

"Emotions", p. 36.
The Second Sin (1973)

Happy , Feeling , Time

“Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you.
Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.”

Thomas Szasz

"Emotions", p. 36.
The Second Sin (1973)

Courage

“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

Childhood
The Second Sin (1973)

“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

Men

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

Thomas Szasz

"Personal Conduct" http://books.google.com/books?id=IYOcAQAAQBAJ&q=%22The+stupid+neither+forgive+nor+forget+the+na%C3%AFve+forgive+and+forget+the+wise+forgive+but+do+not+forget%22&pg=PA177#v=onepage, p. 51. http://openlibrary.org/works/OL15151528W/The_Second_Sin
The Second Sin (1973)

Wise , Life , Stupidity , Forgiveness

“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