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The neurotic has problems the psychotic has solutions.

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
Certainty
Solutions
Problems
Doubt
Problem
Psychosis
Psychotic
Neurosis
Neurotic

More quotes by Thomas Szasz

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If you talk to God, you are praying If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
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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.
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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.
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Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.
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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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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.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
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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He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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How can depression be real if our eyes arent real?
Thomas Szasz
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The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.
Thomas Szasz
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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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Delusion: belief said to be false by someone who does not share it.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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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
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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Sex is a body-contact sport. It is safe to watch but more fun to play.
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