Thomas Szasz: Trending quotes (page 2)

Thomas Szasz trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Thomas Szasz: 140   quotes 11   likes

“The crime [homosexuality] was subject to punishment by both secular and ecclesiastical courts—just as now it is subject to punishment by both penal and psychiatric sanctions.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 164.

“The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be—namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense.”

Thomas Szasz

Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (1979)

Men , Disease , Sense

“As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 160.

Problem , Change , Madness

“We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 161.

“Religious and medical propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold some simple truths to be self-evident. One of these truths is that just as the dead do not rise from the grave, so drugs do not commit crimes. The dead remain dead. Drugs are inert chemicals that have no effect on human beings who choose not to use them. No one has to smoke cigarettes, and no one has to shoot heroin. People smoke cigarettes because they want to, and they shoot heroin because they want to.”

Thomas Szasz

"The Protocols of the Learned Experts on Heroin" http://www.scribd.com/doc/120817550/The-Protocols-Of-The-Learned-Experts-On-Heroin-by-Thomas-Szasz in The Libertarian Review, July 1981, p. 14.

People , Truth , Dead

“In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.”

Thomas Szasz

The Manufacture of Madness (1970) http://books.google.com/books?id=hpOcRRum3XEC&pg=PR24&q="In+the+past+men+created+witches+now+they+create+mental+patients".

Men , Past

“Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.”

Thomas Szasz

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

Sex , Past

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

Thomas Szasz

"The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 346.

Life

“As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person—so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 55.

Men , Thinking , Dependency , Personality

“I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice… Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.”

Thomas Szasz

Preface to the Second Edition.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

Books , Universe , Time

“So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth)—so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self—mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 170.

Men

“It becomes logical to ask where the idea originates that the rules of the game of life ought to be such that those who are weak, disabled or ill should be helped?
One answer is obvious: this is the game typically played in childhood. Every one of us was, at one time, a weak and helpless child, cared for by adults: without such help we would not have survived and become adults.
Another, almost equally obvious answer is that the prescription of a help-giving attitude toward the weak is embodied in the dominant religions of Western man.
Judaism, and especially Christianity, teach these rules by means of parable and prohibition, example and exhortation, and by every other means available to their representatives.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), Chapter 10: The Ethics of Helplessness and Helpfulness.

Life , Religion , Game , Idea

“Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But this is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities.”

Thomas Szasz

Revised edition, 1985. p. 175.
Ceremonial Chemistry (1974)

Business , Personality

“The “treatment” can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual.”

Thomas Szasz

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

Faith

“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.
Can American society survive this legal-psychiatric assault on its moral and political foundations?”

Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

Disease , Behavior , Drink

“Our adversaries are not demons, witches, fate, or mental illness. We have no enemy whom we can fight, exorcise, or dispel by "cure." What we do have are problems in living — whether these be biologic, economic, political, or sociopsychological. In this essay I was concerned only with problems belonging in the last mentioned category, and within this group mainly with those pertaining to moral values. The field to which modern psychiatry addresses itself is vast, and I made no effort to encompass it all. My argument was limited to the proposition that mental illness is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.”

Thomas Szasz book The Myth of Mental Illness

"The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 115.

Fate , Problem , Effort , Fight

“The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.”

Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

Behavior , Personality

“If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: Ceremonial Chemistry (1974), p. 11.

“Judges and prosecutors, lawyers and psychiatrists, all protest their passionate desire to know why a person accused of a crime did what he did. But their actions completely belie their words: their efforts are now directed toward letting everyone speak in court but the defendant himself -- especially if he is accused of a political or psychiatric crime.”

Thomas Szasz

"Law", p. 40.
The Second Sin (1973)

Effort , Passion , Personality

“The disease concept of homosexuality—as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide—conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. … Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy—just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 168.

Alcohol , Disease , Suicide