Recommended quotes
page 43

“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 (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

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

“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 (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

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

“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 (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

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

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

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

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 (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

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

“The 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere...
Sec. 34
The Antichrist (1888)

“I have somehow something like "influence" ... In the Anti-Semitic Correspondence ... my name is mentioned in almost every issue. Zarathustra ... has charmed the anti-Semites; there is a special anti-Semitic interpretation of it that made me laugh very much.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

As quoted in "Idea of Anti-Semitism Filled Nietzsche With Ire and Melancholy" in The New York Times (19 December 1987) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0D91E3EF93AA25751C1A961948260

“Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Variant: The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

“The earth is free even now for great souls. There are still empty seats for the lonesome and the twosome, fanned by the fragrance of silent seas. A free life is still free for great souls. Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges. Thus spoke Zarathustra.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus spoke Zarathustra

“Mais comment pouvons-nous nous retrouver nous-mêmes? Comment l'homme peut-il se connaître? Ce sont là des questions difficiles à résoudre. Si le lièvre a sept peaux, l'homme peut s'en enlever sept fois septante sans qu'il puisse dire ensuite: «Cela est maintenant véritablement toi, ce n'est plus seulement une enveloppe.» De plus, c'est là un geste cruel et dangereux que de fouiller ainsi soi-même sa chair pour descendre brutalement, par le plus court chemin, dans le fond de son être. Comme il arrive facilement qu'on se blesse, sans qu'aucun médecin puisse nous guérir! A quoi cela servirait-il, en outre, si tout témoigne de notre être, nos amitiés et nos inimitiés, notre regard et nos serrements de mains, notre mémoire et ce que nous oublions, nos livres et les traits de notre plume?”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Source: Considérations Inactuelles III

“We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Gay Science

The Gay Science (1882), Sec. 14

“New Domestic Animals. I want to have my lion and my eagle about me, that I may always have hints and premonitions concerning the amount of my strength or weakness. Must I look down on them today, and be afraid of them? And will the hour come once more when they will look up to me, and tremble?”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Gay Science

Sec. 314
The Gay Science (1882)

“The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“Most men are too concerned with themselves to be malicious.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

I.85
Human, All Too Human (1878)

“May I really say it! All truths are bloody truths to me—take a look at my previous writings.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Notebooks (Summer 1880) 4[271]

“Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Letter to Dr. Theodore Canisius (17 May 1859)
1850s

“Therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do appoint the last Thursday in September next, as a day of humiliation, prayer and fasting for all the people of the nation. And I do earnestly recommend to all the People, and especially to all ministers and teachers of religion of all denominations, and to all heads of families, to observe and keep that day according to their several creeds and modes of worship, in all humility and with all religious solemnity, to the end that the united prayer of the nation may ascend to the Throne of Grace and bring down plentiful blessings upon our Country.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Abraham Lincoln: Proclamation of a Day of Fasting (12 August 1861) http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/proc-3.htm <br class="br">1860s

“Well, for people that like that sort of thing, I think it is just about the sort of thing they would like.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Attributed to "an American President" in Ármin Vámbéry (1884), All the Year Round. It more likely originates in a spoof testimonial that Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne) wrote in an advertisement in 1863:
Posthumous attributions

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Sometimes attributed to Lincoln since a 1950 speech of Douglas MacArthur citing him as its author, this is actually from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Misattributed

Recommended quotes page 43

Recommended quotes
page 43