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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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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.
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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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Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.
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He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
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'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.
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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.
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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 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.
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Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient and only such a person can be autonomous.
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Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.
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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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Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.
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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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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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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.
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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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There is no psychology there is only biography and autobiography.
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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.
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People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.
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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
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