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There is no psychology there is only biography and autobiography.

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
Biography
Biographies
Autobiography
Psychology

More quotes by Thomas Szasz

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Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.
Thomas Szasz
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Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.
Thomas Szasz
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Delusion: belief said to be false by someone who does not share it.
Thomas Szasz
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Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it
Thomas Szasz
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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
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How can depression be real if our eyes arent real?
Thomas Szasz
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Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.
Thomas Szasz
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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
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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
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility
Thomas Szasz
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The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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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
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'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it.
Thomas Szasz
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The neurotic has problems the psychotic has solutions.
Thomas Szasz
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The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz