162 Quotes by Thomas Szasz

It is easier to do one’s duty to others than to one’s self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.

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.

Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot – despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists – be both.

If you have strongly held opinions, you are opinionated; if you don’t, you lack conviction: either way, there is something wrong with you.

What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort, or esteem, but games worth playing.

The system isn’t stupid, but the people in it are.

I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government’s business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.

Anyone who seeks to help others – whether by means of religion or by means of medicine – must eschew the use of force.

What, then, are psychotherapists and what do they sell to or impose on their clients? Insofar as they use force, psychotherapists are judges and jailers, inquisitors and torturers; insofar as they eschew it, they are secular priests and pseudomedical rhetoricians. Their services consist of coercions and constraints imposed on individuals on behalf of other persons or social groups, or they consist of contracts and conversations entered into by individuals on their own behalf.