Thomas Szasz – 13 Quotes

13 Quotes by Thomas Szasz

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

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

– Thomas Szasz

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

– Thomas Szasz

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

– Thomas Szasz

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

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

Punishment is now unfashionable… because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

– Thomas Szasz

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

Individual psychotherapy – that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship – requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver.

– Thomas Szasz

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

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

– Thomas Szasz

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

– Thomas Szasz

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time serenity, that nothing is.

– Thomas Szasz