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We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

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
Individual
Collectives
Collective
Meaningless
Prefer
Meaningful
Guilt
Responsibility

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Delusion: belief said to be false by someone who does not share it.
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Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.
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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.
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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.
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Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.
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If you talk to God, you are praying If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
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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.
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Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.
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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.
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The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.
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Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.
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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.
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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.
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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 psychology there is only biography and autobiography.
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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
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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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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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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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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.
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