Quote

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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Thomas Szasz
Age: 92 †
Born: 1920
Born: April 15
Died: 2012
Died: September 8
Academic
Human Rights Activist
Psychiatrist
University Teacher
Writer
Buda Pest
People
Expect
Consideration
Anyone
Folly
Often
Height
Others
Rarely
Persons
Treat
Person
Treats
Better
Kindness
Mistreat
Men
Worse
Decency

More quotes by 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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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.
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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Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession. It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself... in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.
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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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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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 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
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Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
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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The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.
Thomas Szasz
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We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility
Thomas Szasz
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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
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Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.
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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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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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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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.
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