Thomas Szasz Quotes About Age
-
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Soren Kierkegaard Philosopher -
Albert Ellis Psychologist -
Virginia Woolf Writer -
E. Fuller Torrey Psychiatrist -
Erving Goffman Sociologist -
Peter Breggin Psychiatrist -
Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosopher -
-
R. D. Laing Psychiatrist -
Ernest Becker Anthropologist -
Leonard Roy Frank Editor -
Karl A. Menninger Psychiatrist -
Allen Frances Psychiatrist -
Karl Kraus Writer -
Harry Stack Sullivan Psychiatrist -
Michel Foucault Philosopher -
Herge Cartoonist -
William James Philosopher -
Kurt Lewin Psychologist -
Otto Rank Psychoanalyst