Thomas Szasz Quotes

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 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.

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”?

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc.