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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
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Thomas Szasz
Age: 92 †
Born: 1920
Born: April 15
Died: 2012
Died: September 8
Academic
Human Rights Activist
Psychiatrist
University Teacher
Writer
Buda Pest
Persons
Psychology
Person
Excellence
Self
Findings
Something
Discovery
Life
Creating
Thyself
People
Wisdom
Discovering
Often
Finds
Found
Creates
More quotes by Thomas Szasz
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
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
The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.
Thomas Szasz
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.
Thomas Szasz
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.
Thomas Szasz
The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions in his society, the more he must trust those who wield power in it and the more he trusts those who wield such power, the more vulnerable he makes himself to becoming their victim.
Thomas Szasz
Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.
Thomas Szasz
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.
Thomas Szasz
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 often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and decency from a person who mistreats himself.
Thomas Szasz
The stupid neither forgive nor forget the naive forgive and forget the wise forgive but do not forget.
Thomas Szasz
Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease in the twentieth, it's a cure.
Thomas Szasz
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.
Thomas Szasz
If you talk to God, you are praying If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz
People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend upon them. Since they cannot do that, people choose to make the powerful virtuous, glorifying in becoming victimized by them.
Thomas Szasz
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.
Thomas Szasz
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.
Thomas Szasz
The neurotic has problems the psychotic has solutions.
Thomas Szasz
He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
Thomas Szasz
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.
Thomas Szasz
