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People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend upon them. Since they cannot do that, people choose to make the powerful virtuous, glorifying in becoming victimized by them.

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
Glorifying
Powerful
Victimized
Upon
Making
Virtuous
Cannot
Depend
Dream
Depends
Make
Choose
People
Becoming
Since

More quotes by 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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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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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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How can depression be real if our eyes arent real?
Thomas Szasz
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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.
Thomas Szasz
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'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.
Thomas Szasz
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'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it.
Thomas Szasz
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Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.
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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Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults.
Thomas Szasz
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The neurotic has problems the psychotic has solutions.
Thomas Szasz
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In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.
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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No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.
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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Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.
Thomas Szasz
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Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.
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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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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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