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Thomas Szasz

62 quotes

• “In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Manufacture of Madness (1970).

• “Religious and medical propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold some simple truths to be self-evident. One of these truths is that just as the dead do not rise from the grave, so drugs do not commit crimes. The dead remain dead. Drugs are inert chemicals that have no effect on human beings who choose not to use them. No one has to smoke cigarettes, and no one has to shoot heroin. People smoke cigarettes because they want to, and they shoot heroin because they want to.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Protocols of the Learned Experts on Heroin" in The Libertarian Review, July 1981, p. 14.

• “What had been drapetomania became depression. ... Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 346.

• “In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you. Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Judges and prosecutors, lawyers and psychiatrists, all protest their passionate desire to know why a person accused of a crime did what he did. But their actions completely belie their words: their efforts are now directed toward letting everyone speak in court but the defendant himself -- especially if he is accused of a political or psychiatric crime.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions”?”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Although both the natural and moral sciences seek to understand the objects of their observation, in natural science the purpose of this is to be able to control them better, whereas in moral science it is, or ought to be, to be better able to leave them alone. The morally proper aim of psychology, then, is self-control.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice... Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But this is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Revised edition, 1985. p. 175.

• “The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be—namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “People, especially liberals and psychiatrists, say that the two main causes of crime are mental illness and poverty. Insanity is therefore a defense in the criminal law. If we really believed that poverty caused crime, we would have a "poverty defense" as well, attorneys calling professors of economics to testify in court whether a particular defendant is guilty of theft or not by reason of poverty.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In the natural sciences, language (mathematics) is a useful tool: like the microscope or telescope, it enables us to see what is otherwise invisible. In the social sciences, language (literalized metaphor) is an impediment: like a distorting mirror, it prevents us from seeing the obvious. That is why in the natural sciences, knowledge can be gained only with the mastery of their special languages; whereas in human affairs, knowledge can be gained only by rejecting the pretentious jargons of the social sciences.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person—so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Like Karl Kraus, [Wittgenstein] was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear—particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As Justice Olive Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, censorship rests on the idea that “every idea is an incitement.” Perhaps he should have specified “every interesting idea,” for a dull idea is not. By the same token, every interesting drug is an incitement. And so is everything else that people find interesting.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The episode in Sodom is undoubtedly the earliest account in human history of the entrapment of homosexuals, a strategy widely practiced by the law enforcement agencies of modern Western countries, especially those of the United States. In effect, the men of Sodom were entrapped by two strangers, who in truth were not travelers but angels, that is to say, God’s plain-clothesmen. These agents of the Biblical vice-squad wasted no time punishing the offenders.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The crime [homosexuality] was subject to punishment by both secular and ecclesiastical courts—just as now it is subject to punishment by both penal and psychiatric sanctions.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The disease concept of homosexuality—as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide—conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. … Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy—just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth)—so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self—mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “My contention is that the psychiatric perspective on homosexuality is but a thinly disguised replica of the religious perspective which it displaced, and that efforts to “treat” this kind of conduct medically are but thinly disguised methods for suppressing it.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The “treatment” can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.”

  Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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