162 Quotes by Thomas Szasz

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”?

We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic – in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea – known to medical science is work.

Whenever masses of people, especially educated people, know something – and when what they know is something they greatly fear because they believe it affects virtually everything they do or want to do – then most likely we stand in the presence of a vast falsehood.

Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it.

Mental illness, of course, is not literally a ‘thing’ – or physical object – and hence it can ‘exist’ only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.

The FDA calls certain substances “controlled.” But there are no “controlled substances,” there are only controlled citizens.

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 language of science – and especially of a science of man – is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.