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Арабские красавицы на фестивале в Дубаи. ТОП-10Арабские красавицы на фестивале в Дубаи. ТОП-10 14 самых удивительных вертикальных садов мира14 самых удивительных вертикальных садов мира Крупнейшие радиационные аварии и катастрофы современностиКрупнейшие радиационные аварии и катастрофы современности
Thomas Szasz

The two greatest enemies of th...

The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against that which makes a person an individual: communism against the ownership of property, psychiatry against the ownership of the self (mind and body). Communists criminalize the autonomous use of capital and labor, and harshly punish those who 'traffic' in the black market, especially in foreign currencies. Psychiatrists criminalize the autonomous use of the self, and harshly punish those who 't

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

When the psychiatrist approves...

When the psychiatrist approves of a person's actions, he judges that person to have acted with 'free choice'; when he disapproves,he judges him to have acted without 'free choice.' It is small wonder that people find 'free choice' a confusing idea: 'free choice' appears to refer to what the person being judged (often called the 'patient') does, whereas it is actually what the person making the judgment (often a psychiatrist or other mental health worker) thinks.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

If someone does something we d...

If someone does something we disapprove of, we regard him as bad if we believe we can deter him from persisting in his conduct, but we regard him as mad if we believe we cannot. In either case, the crucial issue is our control of the other: the more we lose control over him, and the more he assumes control over himself, the more, in case of conflict, we are likely to consider him mad rather than just bad.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

Competence in heterosexuality,...

Competence in heterosexuality, or at least the appearance or pretense of such competence, is as much a public affair as a privateone. Thus, going steady is a high school diploma in heterosexuality; engagement a BA; marriage an MA; and children a Ph.D.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

In the United States today, th...

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 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

We achieve active mastery over...

We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

Insanity is the only sane reac...

Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

When a man says that he is Jes...

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

Prostitution is said to be the...

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.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

The wise treat self-respect as...

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

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

Marx said that religion was th...

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

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

The Nazis spoke of having a Je...

The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, 'Jewish problem' was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; 'drug-abuse problem' is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

For Jews, the Messiah has neve...

For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the 'scientists' who promise salvation through the 'discoveries' of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

If, nevertheless, textbooks of...

If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

The great shift ... is the mov...

The great shift ... is the movement away from the value-laden languages of ... the 'humanities,' and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the 'sciences.' This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is ... especially important in psychology ... and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

As the dominant social ethic c...

As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

We shall therefore compare the...

We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

The Christian ethic did not ra...

The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

In English-speaking countries,...

In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. ... Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines 'buggery' as 'heresy, sodomy.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes
Thomas Szasz

Like the devout theologian see...

Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.

Thomas Szasz 169 quotes

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