Words matter. These are the best Thomas Szasz Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.
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.
If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.
The proverb warns that ‘You should not bite the hand that feeds you.’ But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
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.
Mental illness, of course, is not literally a ‘thing’ – or physical object – and hence it can ‘exist’ only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.
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.
In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.
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.
Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.
If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
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.
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.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they make a good excuse.
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.
The system isn’t stupid, but the people in it are.