Being considered or labeled mentally disordered—abnormal, crazy, mad, psychotic, sick, it matters not what variant is used—is the most profoundly discrediting classification that can be imposed on a person today. Mental illness casts the "patient" out of our social order just as surely as heresy cast the "witch" out of medieval society. That, indeed, is the very purpose of stigma terms.

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

More quotations tagged with “illness”

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

—Francis Bacon

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Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

—Fran Lebowitz

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Ed felt faint. Milk shake, as it turned out, was much less handy in your veins then, say, oxygen.

—Francine Pascal in Sam

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Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath.

—Charlotte Joko Beck

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Kids are like buckets of disease that live in your house.

—Louis C.K.

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History

23 Nov 2014 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

Being considered or labeled mentally disordered — abnormal, crazy, mad, psychotic, sick, it matters not what variant is used — is the most profoundly discrediting classification that can be imposed on a person today. Mental illness casts the "patient" out of our social order just as surely as heresy cast the "witch" out of medieval society. That, indeed, is the very purpose of stigma terms.