Thomas Szasz Quotations

If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

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

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

Mental illness, of course, is not literally a 'thing' - or physical object - and hence it can 'exist' only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.

The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.

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.

It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.

Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver.

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

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.

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.

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

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.

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.

The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

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

Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.

There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.

No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.

'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.

If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

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

He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.

Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; love by love.

Whenever masses of people, especially educated people, know something- and when what they know is something they greatly fear because they believe it affects virtually everything they do or want to do - then most likely we stand in the presence of a

Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.

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

Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is morally desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. ... Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines "buggery" as "heresy, sodomy.

We have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.

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

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.

The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.

Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession . 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.

We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living.

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.

The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.

Traditionally, sex has been a very private, secretive activity. Herein perhaps lies its powerful force for uniting people in a strong bond. As we make sex less secretive, we may rob it of its power to hold men and women together.

Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.

He who forgiveth, and is reconciled unto his enemy, shall receive his reward from God; for he loveth not the unjust doers.

I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it to the category of pseudo-science.

Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.

It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal.

What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort, or esteem, but games worth playing

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no "controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens.

Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.

Sex is a body-contact sport. It is safe to watch but more fun to play.

Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love.

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.

Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit.

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.

Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.

Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected American Society within the last fifty years.

Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that very poor and very rich adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can do drugs, have sex, make babies, and get money (from their parents, crime, or the State). For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?

In the 60s people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal. In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.

I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in the condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male.

Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.

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.

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.

Psychiatry does not commit human rights abuse. It is a human rights abuse.

We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.

Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.

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.

The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, "Jewish problem" was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; "drug-abuse problem" is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.

Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.

The neurotic has problems; the psychotic has solutions.

Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure.

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.

Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.

Had the white settlers in North America called the natives 'Americans' instead of 'Indians', the early Americans could not have said that the 'only good Indian is a dead Indian' and could not have deprived them so easily of their lands and lands and lives. Robbing people of their proper names is often the first step in robbing them of their property, liberty, and life.

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.

Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which may be why they don't work here on Earth.

Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding. Hence the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of reason in human affairs.

Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere, by force, with a persons decision to commit this act. The result is a far-reaching infantilization and dehumanization of the suicidal person.

Delusion: belief said to be false by someone who does not share it.

The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.

The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.

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.

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

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.

The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against that which makes a person an individual: communism against the ownership of property, psychiatry against the ownership of the self (mind and body). Communists criminalize the autonomous use of capital and labor, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in the black market, especially in foreign currencies. Psychiatrists criminalize the autonomous use of the self, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in self-abuse, especially in self-medication and self-destruction.

Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance.

When the psychiatrist approves of a person's actions, he judges that person to have acted with "free choice"; when he disapproves,he judges him to have acted without "free choice." It is small wonder that people find "free choice" a confusing idea: "free choice" appears to refer to what the person being judged (often called the "patient") does, whereas it is actually what the person making the judgment (often a psychiatrist or other mental health worker) thinks.

If someone does something we disapprove of, we regard him as bad if we believe we can deter him from persisting in his conduct, but we regard him as mad if we believe we cannot.

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.

For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.

The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic - in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea - known to medical science is work.