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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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Thomas Szasz
Age: 92 †
Born: 1920
Born: April 15
Died: 2012
Died: September 8
Academic
Human Rights Activist
Psychiatrist
University Teacher
Writer
Buda Pest
Mutually
Repression
Rhetoric
Ingredients
Categories
Basic
Religion
Overlapping
Psychotherapy

More quotes by Thomas Szasz

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Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.
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The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
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Delusion: belief said to be false by someone who does not share it.
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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.
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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.
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If you talk to God, you are praying If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
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When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
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Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.
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We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility
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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.
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The stupid neither forgive nor forget the naive forgive and forget the wise forgive but do not forget.
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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.
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Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which may be why they don't work here on Earth.
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Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.
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Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.
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The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.
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Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.
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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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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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After generations of living under medical tutelage, which provides us with protection (albeit illusory) against dangerous drugs, we have failed to cultivate the self-reliance and self-discipline we must possess as competent adults surrounded by the fruits of our pharmacological-technological age.
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