Thomas Szasz Quotes

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

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

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.

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.

Prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession. It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself … in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.

Judges and prosecutors, lawyers and psychiatrists, all protest their passionate desire to know why a person accused of a crime did what he did. But their actions completely belie their words: their efforts are now directed toward letting everyone speak in court but the defendant himself -- especially if he is accused of a political or psychiatric crime.

Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you. Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.

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.

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

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

What had been drapetomania became depression. ... Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.

For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation—excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing—was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion. ... With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization.

Religious and medical propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold some simple truths to be self-evident. One of these truths is that just as the dead do not rise from the grave, so drugs do not commit crimes. The dead remain dead. Drugs are inert chemicals that have no effect on human beings who choose not to use them. No one has to smoke cigarettes, and no one has to shoot heroin. People smoke cigarettes because they want to, and they shoot heroin because they want to.

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