Томас Сас: Цитаты на английском языке

“Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.”

“People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.”

“When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him..”

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”

“Punishment is now unfashionable… because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.”

“Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you.
Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.”

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

“It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living.
I have argued that, today, the notion of a person "having a mental illness" is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization — namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases.
Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest.”

“As Justice Olive Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, censorship rests on the idea that “every idea is an incitement.” Perhaps he should have specified “every interesting idea,” for a dull idea is not. By the same token, every interesting drug is an incitement. And so is everything else that people find interesting.”

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

“The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.”

“Prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession.”

“The proverb warns that, 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.”

“In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”

“If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”

“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.”

“Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.”

“Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.”

“Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.”