Quote

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

Thomas Szasz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Szasz
Age: 92 †
Born: 1920
Born: April 15
Died: 2012
Died: September 8
Academic
Human Rights Activist
Psychiatrist
University Teacher
Writer
Buda Pest
Mental
Patient
Created
Create
Past
Witches
Men
Patients
Witch
Madness

More quotes by Thomas Szasz

Image
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.
Thomas Szasz
Image
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
Image
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.
Thomas Szasz
Image
A person cannot make another happy, but he can make him unhappy. This is the main reason why there is more unhappiness than happiness in the world.
Thomas Szasz
Image
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
Image
Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.
Thomas Szasz
Image
The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.
Thomas Szasz
Image
Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.
Thomas Szasz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Thomas Szasz
Image
There is no psychology there is only biography and autobiography.
Thomas Szasz
Image
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.
Thomas Szasz
Image
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.
Thomas Szasz
Image
The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.
Thomas Szasz
Image
Sex is a body-contact sport. It is safe to watch but more fun to play.
Thomas Szasz
Image
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
Image
'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it.
Thomas Szasz
Image
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
Image
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.
Thomas Szasz