Quotes from Thomas Stephen Szasz

The sense of national emergency engendered by war transforms the destruction of dissident opinion into patriotism.

Thousands of years ago--in times we are fond of calling primitive (since this renders us modern without having to exert ourselves further to earn this qualification)...

Neither he [Ferenczi] nor Freud believed that a person should be exempted from legal punishment--or worse, that he should be punished by compulsory psychiatric treatments--because of psychoanalytic information about him. In the light of current thought, this is a startling and sobering fact.

The proverb warns that, 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.

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

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.

Why don't you have a right to say you are Jesus? And why isn't the proper response to that "congratulations"?

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

Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation from others, and thus affords them the possibility of dignity. They loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, and thus confronts them with the possibility of insignificance.

It seems to me that-at least in our scientific theories of behavior-we have failed to accept the simple fact that human relations are inherently fraught with difficulties and that to make them even relatively harmonious requires much patience and hard work.

The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them in the role of mental patient,and against psychiatrists whose livelihood depends on defining them as mentally ill.

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"?