Top 90 Thomas Szasz Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.”

— Thomas Szasz

52. “Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.”

— Thomas Szasz

53. “We often speak of love when we really should be speaking of the drive to dominate or to master, so as to confirm ourselves as active agents, in control of our own destinies and worthy of respect from others.”

— Thomas Szasz

54. “Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person’s self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient’s cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.”

— Thomas Szasz

55. “A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.”

— Thomas Szasz

56. “Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.”

— Thomas Szasz

57. “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.”

— Thomas Szasz

58. “The language of science – and especially of a science of man – is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.”

— Thomas Szasz

59. “Psychiatry does not commit human rights abuse. It is a human rights abuse.”

— Thomas Szasz

60. “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

61. “The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.”

— Thomas Szasz

62. “Men often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and decency from a person who mistreats himself.”

— Thomas Szasz

63. “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

64. “If you have strongly held opinions, you are opinionated; if you don’t, you lack conviction: either way, there is something wrong with you.”

— Thomas Szasz

65. “The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.”

— Thomas Szasz

66. “Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere, by force, with a persons decision to commit this act. The result is a far-reaching infantilization and dehumanization of the suicidal person.”

— Thomas Szasz

67. “The system isn’t stupid, but the people in it are.”

— Thomas Szasz

68. “Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected American Society within the last fifty years.”

— Thomas Szasz

69. “He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.”

— Thomas Szasz

70. “How can depression be real if our eyes arent real?”

— Thomas Szasz

71. “Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it.”

— Thomas Szasz

72. “I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it to the category of pseudo-science.”

— Thomas Szasz

73. “The FDA calls certain substances “controlled.” But there are no “controlled substances,” there are only controlled citizens.”

— Thomas Szasz

74. “Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem.”

— Thomas Szasz

75. “Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.”

— Thomas Szasz

76. “Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot – despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists – be both.”

— Thomas Szasz

77. “When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.”

— Thomas Szasz

78. “Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding. Hence the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of reason in human affairs.”

— Thomas Szasz

79. “The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women can experience it through fornication, but not through friendship.”

— Thomas Szasz

80. “What, then, are psychotherapists and what do they sell to or impose on their clients? Insofar as they use force, psychotherapists are judges and jailers, inquisitors and torturers; insofar as they eschew it, they are secular priests and pseudomedical rhetoricians. Their services consist of coercions and constraints imposed on individuals on behalf of other persons or social groups, or they consist of contracts and conversations entered into by individuals on their own behalf.”

— Thomas Szasz

81. “Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.”

— Thomas Szasz

82. “Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people.”

— Thomas Szasz

83. “Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which may be why they don’t work here on Earth.”

— Thomas Szasz

84. “I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government’s business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.”

— Thomas Szasz

85. “The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.”

— Thomas Szasz

86. “The insanity defense is not merciful. Involuntary mental hospitalization is not a treatment. Both are coercive methods of social control. Both rest on attributing an absence of mens rea to the actor. Both result in the “protected” person’s being deprived of liberty. Both function as tactical weapons in psychiatry’s war on dignity, liberty, and responsibility.”

— Thomas Szasz

87. “Anyone who seeks to help others – whether by means of religion or by means of medicine – must eschew the use of force.”

— Thomas Szasz

88. “Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.”

— Thomas Szasz

89. “You have to know history to appreciate the absurdity of what is called the ‘medical model’, because it’s simply absurd.”

— Thomas Szasz

90. “Incarceration in a mental hospital is unlawful deprivation of liberty, that mental illnesses are fictitious diseases, and that coercive psychiatry is social control, not medical care.”

— Thomas Szasz

91. “There is no evidence that suicide prevention prevents suicide. Psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals are regularly sued and found liable for patient suicides. Psychiatrists kill themselves at three times the rate of the general public.”

— Thomas Szasz

92. “The fact that physicians commit suicide more frequently than do lay persons ought to unmask their claims about suicide prevention as self-serving propaganda.”

— Thomas Szasz

93. “In the history of the twentieth century, the principal dramatis personae were National and International Socialisms, better known as Nazism and Communism. Their citizens evaded the duty of self-responsibility by claiming to be “following orders.” Following orders -attributed to or issued by God, the State, Science, Medicine-is always the easy way out. Refusing to do so requires self-reliance and resisting temptations and threats.”

— Thomas Szasz

94. “The fact that atomic energy is used in warfare does not make international conflicts problems in physics; likewise, the fact that the brain is used in human behavior does not make moral and personal conflicts problems in medicine.”

— Thomas Szasz

95. “It is conceivable, of course, that significant physicochemical disturbances will be found in some “mental patients” and in some “conditions” now labeled “mental illnesses.” But this does not mean that all so-called mental diseases have biological “causes,” for the simple reason that it has become customary to use the term “mental illness” to stigmatize, and thus control, those persons whose behavior offends society – or the psychiatrist making the “diagnosis.”

— Thomas Szasz