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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

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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
Age
Regards
Wrong
Fatal
Society
Falsehood
Truth
Regard
Right
Majority
Early
Dangerous
Taught

More quotes by 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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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
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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The stupid neither forgive nor forget the naive forgive and forget the wise forgive but do not forget.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which may be why they don't work here on Earth.
Thomas Szasz
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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
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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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Knowledge is gained by learning trust by doubt skill by practice and love by love.
Thomas Szasz
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'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.
Thomas Szasz
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The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.
Thomas Szasz
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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
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There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.
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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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
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The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.
Thomas Szasz
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In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.
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
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Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people.
Thomas Szasz
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Competence in heterosexuality, or at least the appearance or pretense of such competence, is as much a public affair as a privateone. Thus, going steady is a high school diploma in heterosexuality engagement a BA marriage an MA and children a Ph.D.
Thomas Szasz