Thomas Szasz Quotes About Age

Quotes about: Age

• 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

  Love, Responsibility, Sick

• The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. 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: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.

  Thomas Szasz

  Religious, Men, Roots

• A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

  Thomas Szasz

  Family, Children, Maturity

  The Second Sin (1973) "Childhood"

• Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

  Thomas Szasz

  Vocabulary, Expectations, Political

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.27, Syracuse University Press

• 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

  Age, Majority, Taught

• Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.

  Thomas Szasz

  Age, Pork, Heroin

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1973). “The second sin”, Anchor

• After generations of living under medical tutelage, which provides us with protection (albeit illusory) against "dangerous drugs", we have failed to cultivate the self-reliance and self-discipline we must possess as competent adults surrounded by the fruits of our pharmacological-technological age.

  Thomas Szasz

  Self, Discipline, Drug

  Thomas Szasz (1996). “Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market”, p.24, Syracuse University Press

• Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

  Thomas Szasz

  Childhood, Fatherhood, Age

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