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Quotes From Famous Authors
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Thomas Stephen Szasz Facts
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Thomas Stephen Szasz was a Hungarian-American academic, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism. Szasz argued throughout his career that mental illness is a metaphor for human problems in living, and that mental illnesses are not "illnesses" in the sense that physical illnesses are; and that except for a few identifiable brain diseases, there are "neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying DSM diagnoses." His views on special treatment followed from libertarian roots, based on the principles that each person has the right to bodily and mental self-ownership and the right to be free from violence from others, and he criticized the "Free World" as well as the communist states for their use of psychiatry. (1920-2012) |
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Quotes by Thomas Stephen Szasz
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Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.
Thomas Szasz
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Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.
Thomas Szasz
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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
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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
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If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia
Thomas Szasz
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In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.
Thomas Szasz
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It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal.
Thomas Szasz /The Myth of Mental Illness/
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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.
Thomas Szasz /The Second Sin /
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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
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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
Thomas Szasz
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The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing.
Thomas Szasz
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The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.
Thomas Szasz
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Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.
Thomas Szasz
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When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him..
Thomas Szasz
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