1. “Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love.”
2. “In the past, men create witches: now they create mental patients.”
3. “Psychiatry does not commit human rights abuse. It is human rights abuse.”
4. “In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”
5. “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”
6. “Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.”
7. “Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit.”
8. “Delusion: belief said to be false by someone who does not share it.”
9. “Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.”
10. “The system isn’t stupid, but the people in it are.”
11. “What people need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort, or esteem, but games worth playing.”
12. “He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.”
13. “Labelling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.”
14. “The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but o not forget.”
15. “The neurotic has problems; the psychotic has solutions.”
16. “The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it foe health or wealth or anything else.”
17. “Marriages are said to be made in Heaven, which is why they don’t work here on Earth.”
18. “Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.”
19. “The poor needs jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.”
20. “When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.”
21. “Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.”
22. “The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.”
23. “Permissiveness is the principle of treating as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.”
24. “The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.”
25. “Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they make a good excuse.”
26. “There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.”
27. “We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living.”
28. “Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”
29. “The basic ingredients of psychotherapy re religion, rhetoric ad repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.”
30. “A teacher should have maximal authority and minimal power.”
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