Thomas Szasz Quotes


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.


Citations

Szasz, Thomas. The Second Sin. Anchor Press, 1973, p. 63.

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Even though a Muslim and one of the senior members of Jinnah's Muslim League, he thought that Jinnah and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee were delusional about being able to have a Muslim nation encompassing the Punjab. He was right, and hundreds of thousands died in Sikh-Muslim attacks and then Hindu-Muslim conflict in the Punjab. Khizar left politics and would not take any post in Pakistan after the partition of the Punjab and the slaughter that followed.


Thomas Szasz
Thomas Szasz
  • Born: April 15, 1920
  • Died: September 8, 2012
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Psychologist

Thomas Stephen Szasz was a Hungarian-American academic, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism. His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and The Manufacture of Madness (1970) set out some of the arguments most associated with him.