Quote

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

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
Time
Creation
Immediate
Circumcision
Conditions
Routine
Surgical
Practice
Absurd
Correction
Born
Male
Mammals
Human
Acknowledge
Premise
Humans
Males
Corrections
Come
Condition
Premises
Believe
Requires
Rests
Mammal

More quotes by Thomas Szasz

Image
The neurotic has problems the psychotic has solutions.
Thomas Szasz
Image
There is no psychology there is only biography and autobiography.
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
He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
Thomas Szasz
Image
Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
Thomas Szasz
Image
'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.
Thomas Szasz
Image
Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease in the twentieth, it's a cure.
Thomas Szasz
Image
The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.
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
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
The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.
Thomas Szasz
Image
Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people.
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
The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.
Thomas Szasz
Image
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.
Thomas Szasz