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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.

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
Opiate
Opiates
Marx
Religion
United
States
Today
People

More quotes by Thomas Szasz

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The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.
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We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility
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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.
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In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.
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The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic - in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea - known to medical science is work.
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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 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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Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease in the twentieth, it's a cure.
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Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.
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Mental illness, of course, is not literally a thing - or physical object - and hence it can exist only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.
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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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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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In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.
Thomas Szasz
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When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
Thomas Szasz
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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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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
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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.
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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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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When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.
Thomas Szasz