45 Quotes by Thomas Stephen Szasz

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.

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 judge punishes lawbreakers as a burning house injures its occupants. A person may be burned to death while robbing a home or saving a friend. Similarly, from a moral point of view, the judge's work is good or evil, depending on whether the laws he enforces are good or evil.

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

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him..

Institutions, no less than persons, may need to be socialized.

Neither he [Ferenczi] nor Freud believed that a person should be exempted from legal punishment--or worse, that he should be punished by compulsory psychiatric "treatments"--because of psychoanalytic information about him. In the light of current thought, this is a startling and sobering fact.

Scientific knowledge does not contain within itself directions for its humanitarian use.

Thousands of years ago--in times we are fond of calling "primitive" (since this renders us "modern" without having to exert ourselves further to earn this qualification)...