Top 20 Thomas Szasz Quotes

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 tim

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
Thomas Szasz
There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.
Thomas Szasz
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
If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.
Thomas Szasz
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
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
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.
Thomas Szasz
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
In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.
Thomas Szasz
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
Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
Thomas Szasz
A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.
Thomas Szasz
If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz
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
He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
Thomas Szasz
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
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
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they make a good excuse.
Thomas Szasz
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.
Thomas Szasz
The system isn’t stupid, but the people in it are.
Thomas Szasz