Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that… adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can do drugs, have sex, make babies, and get money.… For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?

About Thomas Szasz

Thomas Stephen Szasz ( SAHSS; Hungarian: Szász Tamás István [saːs]; 15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012) was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the...

More quotations from Thomas Szasz

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

—Thomas Szasz

Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose.

—Thomas Szasz

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

—Thomas Szasz

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

—Thomas Szasz

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.

—Thomas Szasz

happiness

History

1 Jan 2016 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that . . . adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can do drugs, have sex, make babies, and get money. . . . For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?