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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.

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
Another
Cannot
Persons
Person
Unhappiness
Reason
Unhappy
Make
Main
World
Happiness
Happy

More quotes by 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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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.
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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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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In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. ... Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines buggery as heresy, sodomy.
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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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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The stupid neither forgive nor forget the naive forgive and forget the wise forgive but do not forget.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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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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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 poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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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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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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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.
Thomas Szasz
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Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
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 system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.
Thomas Szasz