Thomas Szasz Quotes

I loved everything. I loved sciences and I loved humanities. But ultimately, I felt that in the humanities, you know, you're writing about things that already exist. But in the sciences, you're discovering things that no one has known before. Ultimately I chose psychology because it seemed to combine science with things that I liked to think about.

If you intend to study the mind, you must have systematic training; you must practice to bring the mind under your control, to attain to that consciousness from which you will be able to study the mind and remain unmoved by any of its wild gyrations. Otherwise the facts observed will not be reliable; they will not apply to all people and therefore will not be truly facts or data at all.

All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.

I think that we have basically nothing in the field of human behavior. Maybe that is just a condition of temporary ignorance. But it may be that we are simply not intellectually equipped to develop such a theory.

America has not always been kind to its artists and scholars. Somehow the scientists always seem to get the penthouse while the arts and humanities get the basement.

The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone that has produced all the elevations of humanity so far?

A philosophy can and must be worked out with the greatest rigour and discipline in the details, but can ultimately be founded on nothing but faith: and this is the reason, I suspect, why the novelties in philosophy are only in elaboration, and never in fundamentals.

What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary

The sciences are the 'how,' and the humanities are the 'why' - why are we here, why do we believe in the things we believe in. I don't think you can have the 'how' without the 'why.'

Economists and technologists bring the "bits", but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the "wits.

It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

Even bullies need love.

It is still open to question whether psychology is a natural science, or whether it can be regarded as a science at all.

Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely.

To regard such a positive mental science [psychology] as rising above the sphere of history, and establishing the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature, is therefore possible only to a person who mistakes the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

The sciences that purport to treat of human things -- the new scientific storyings of the social, the political, the racial or ethnic, and the psychic, nature of human beings -- treat not of human things but mere things, things that make up the physical, or circumstantial, content of human life but are not of the stuff of humanity, have not the human essence in them.

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.

How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

All the scientist creates in a fact is the language in which he enunciates it. If he predicts a fact, he will employ this language, and for all those who can speak and understand it, his prediction is free from ambiguity. Moreover, this prediction once made, it evidently does not depend upon him whether it is fulfilled or not.

Religion is a practical discipline and it's one that we have always done, ever since humanity appeared on the scene when Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens. Sapiens became a human being, our minds very naturally segue into transcendence.