Thomas Szasz Quotes about Responsibility

We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

Meaningful, Responsibility, Guilt

Thomas Stephen Szasz (2004). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.79, Transaction Publishers

We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.

Thomas Szasz

Love, Responsibility, Sick

Autonomy... is freedom to develop one's self - to increase one's knowledge, improve one's skills, and achieve responsibility for one's conduct. And it is freedom to lead one's own life, to choose among alternative courses of action so long as no injury to others results.

Thomas Szasz

Responsibility, Self, Skills

Thomas Szasz (1988). “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Theory and Method of Autonomous Psychotherapy”, p.22, Syracuse University Press

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

Thomas Szasz

Meaningful, Anger, Responsibility

Thomas Stephen Szasz (1990). “The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary”, Open Court Publishing Company