He who does not want to understand the Other has no right to say that what the Other does or says makes no sense.

— Thomas Szasz

Honoring the value of competence and steadfastness requires a generosity of spirit and a curbing of the passion for envy, traits that few people value and fewer still cultivate and acquire. Not until there is more of Smith and less of Hobbes in the human heart, will the majority of people prefer peaceful and boring market relations to the violent and exciting relations between coercer and coerced, predator and victim

— Thomas Szasz

If a man loses his money through unwise market speculation or by playing the horses, he has been punished in a manner which we may call passive. By this I mean that another person has not taken special, socially overt steps to harm the "offender." This phenomenon has not received the attention it deserves.

— Thomas Szasz

If we regard the state as the father, and the citizens as children, there are three alternatives. First, the father may be bad and despotic:this, most people will agree, was the case in Czarist Russia. Second, the father may be good, but somewhat tyrannical; this is the way the Communist governments in Russia and China picture themselves. Third, the father may not act as a father at all, for the children have grown up, and there is mutual respect among them. All are now governed by the same rules of behavior (laws): this is the Anglo-American concept of nonpaternalistic humanism and liberty under law.

— Thomas Szasz

If you talk to God you are praying if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

— Thomas Szasz

In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy.

— Thomas Szasz

Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver.

— Thomas Szasz

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

— Thomas Szasz

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.

— Thomas Szasz

Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot--despite the pretensions and protestations of psychiatrists--be both.

— Thomas Szasz