Top 90 Thomas Szasz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.”

— Thomas Szasz

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

— Thomas Szasz

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

— Thomas Szasz

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

— Thomas Szasz

5. “Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love.”

— Thomas Szasz

6. “Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit.”

— Thomas Szasz

7. “There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.”

— Thomas Szasz

8. “Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.”

— Thomas Szasz

9. “Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life’s currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose.”

— Thomas Szasz

10. “Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.”

— Thomas Szasz

11. “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

12. “The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.”

— Thomas Szasz

13. “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”

— Thomas Szasz

14. “There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.”

— Thomas Szasz

15. “Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.”

— Thomas Szasz

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Delusion: belief said to be false by someone who does not share it.”

— Thomas Szasz

21. “The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic – in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea – known to medical science is work.”

— Thomas Szasz

22. “The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.”

— Thomas Szasz

23. “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.”

— Thomas Szasz

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Thomas Szasz

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

— Thomas Szasz

28. “Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.”

— Thomas Szasz

29. “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

30. “Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults.”

— Thomas Szasz

31. “If someone does something we disapprove of, we regard him as bad if we believe we can deter him from persisting in his conduct, but we regard him as mad if we believe we cannot.”

— Thomas Szasz

32. “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.”

— Thomas Szasz

33. “Man cannot long survive without air, water, and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.”

— Thomas Szasz

34. “It is easier to do one’s duty to others than to one’s self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.”

— Thomas Szasz

35. “All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.”

— Thomas Szasz

36. “Whenever masses of people, especially educated people, know something – and when what they know is something they greatly fear because they believe it affects virtually everything they do or want to do – then most likely we stand in the presence of a vast falsehood.”

— Thomas Szasz

37. “Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance.”

— Thomas Szasz

38. “Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.”

— Thomas Szasz

39. “People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend upon them. Since they cannot do that, people choose to make the powerful virtuous, glorifying in becoming victimized by them.”

— Thomas Szasz

40. “Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.”

— Thomas Szasz

41. “We have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.”

— Thomas Szasz

42. “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

43. “What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort, or esteem, but games worth playing.”

— Thomas Szasz

44. “We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.”

— Thomas Szasz

45. “I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in the condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male.”

— Thomas Szasz

46. “The neurotic has problems; the psychotic has solutions.”

— Thomas Szasz

47. “The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions in his society, the more he must trust those who wield power in it; and the more he trusts those who wield such power, the more vulnerable he makes himself to becoming their victim.”

— Thomas Szasz

48. “A person cannot make another happy, but he can make him unhappy. This is the main reason why there is more unhappiness than happiness in the world.”

— Thomas Szasz

49. “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

50. “We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living.”

— Thomas Szasz