Thomas Szasz Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.

  Thomas Szasz

  Greek, Language, Failing

  "The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary". Book by Thomas Szasz, 1990.

• Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults.

  Thomas Szasz

  Self, Tongue, Adults

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

  Thomas Szasz

  Men, Dignity, Language

  Thomas Stephen Szasz, Karl Kraus (1990). “Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry”, p.44, Syracuse University Press

• 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

  Discipline, Psychology, Humanity

  "Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry". Book by Thomas Szasz and Karl Kraus (p. 44), March 1, 1990.

• As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person - so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters.

  Thomas Szasz

  Men, Thinking, Noble

  "Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry". Book by Thomas Szasz, May 1, 1990.

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