Thomas Szasz Quotes
The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.
Szasz, Thomas. The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement. Harper & Row, 1970, p. 55.
He served a jail sentence in Britain for inciting race hatred.
Much of the culture of sexism and racism is perpetuated by language—especially the language of leaders, role, models, and authority figures. “Political correctness” cannot, in a free society, be enforced on anyone. However, making people aware of the implication of certain kinds of language usage is important provided it doesn’t cross the line of curtailing freedom of speech. People who want to perpetuate sexism by their choice of language have the right to do so in America. What is sad, however is the many people who are perpetuating sexism without ever intending to do so. Abdul-Jabbar has been a leader who has made many male sports figures more aware if the implications of their language usage.
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.
