Thomas Szasz

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

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

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.

The sense of national emergency engendered by war transforms the destruction of dissident opinion into patriotism.

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

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 __auses_ of these __onditions_?

We cannot institutionalize helping the "victims" of personal disasters.

The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing.

The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them in the role of mental patient,and against psychiatrists whose livelihood depends on defining them as mentally ill.

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications.

A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result has been the aggrandizement of psychiatry. The value to the legal profession and to society as a whole of psychiatric help in administering the criminal law, is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps society has been injured, rather than helped, by the furor psychodiagnosticus and psychotherapeuticus in criminology which it invited, fostered, and tolerated.