Thomas Szasz Quotes

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

The self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.

Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living and a psychotic if he makes others suffer.

Happiness is ... usually attributed by adults to children and by children to adults.

If you talk to God you are praying if God talks to you you have schizophrenia.

The stupid neither forgive nor forget the naive forgive and forget the wise forgive but do not forget.

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.

Men often have grievances against prominent and powerful persons. Historically, the grievances of the powerless against the powerful have furnished the steam for the engines of revolutions. My point is that in many of the famous medicolegal cases involving the issue of insanity, persons of relatively low social rank openly attacked their superiors. Perhaps their grievances were real and justified, and were vented on the contemporary social symbols of authority, the King and the Queen. Whether or not these grievances justified homicide is not our problem here. I merely wish to suggest that the issue of insanity may have been raised in these trials to obscure the social problems which the crimes intended to dramatize.