Thomas Szasz Quotes

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

Christianity did take a lot of Greek concepts.

The original Greek word "idiotes" referred to people who might have had a high IQ, but were so self-involved that they focused exclusively on their own life and were both ignorant of and uncaring about public concerns and the common good.

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

As far as the job of President goes, its rewarding and I've given before this group the definition of happiness for the Greeks. I'll define it again: the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, that the Presidency provides some happiness.

Men are apt to be much more influenced by words than by the actual facts of the surrounding reality

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.

Euphemisms, like fashions, have their day and pass, perhaps to return at another time. Like the guests at a masquerade ball, they enjoy social approval only so long as they retain the capacity for deception.

Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of preexisting things; so that all becoming might more correctly be called becoming mixed, and all corruption, becoming separate.

When the Greeks said, Whom the gods love die young, they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die; young and playful.

...when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars

Education lays hold of what is best in a person, but character lays hold of what is worse. It takes hold of a failing and by very skillful manipulation and training turns it into a perfection.

The older you get, the more power you have with language as a writer, which means that you have to be extra responsible for what you say, whether it's in print or in front of a microphone, because those words can go out and kill or go out and plant seeds for peace.

Of all peoples the Greeks have dreamt the dream of life best.

The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.

The Greeks understood that mind and body must develop in harmounious proportions to produce a creative intelligence.

Words have ruined more souls than any devil's agency.

Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.

A state is not the same thing as a society, although the Greeks and Romans thought it was. A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis.

The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.