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Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.

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
Abolished
Psychiatry
Psychology
Child
Cannot
Must
Children
Reformed

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Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.
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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.
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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.
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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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The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.
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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
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We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.
Thomas Szasz
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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
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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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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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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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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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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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There is no psychology there is only biography and autobiography.
Thomas Szasz
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Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease in the twentieth, it's a cure.
Thomas Szasz
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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
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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
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I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in the condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male.
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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Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.
Thomas Szasz