New Book: Szasz Quotationary: The Wit and Wisdom of Thomas Szasz

One of the most eloquent defenders of freedom has a new book that captures the breadth of his thought over more than 5 decades. The Szasz Quotationary: The Wit and Wisdom of Thomas Szasz has just been released in Kindle form. You can purchase the book from Amazon here.

Though Szasz is a native Hungarian, his English is more graceful than the writing of at least 99% of Ivy League English professors. He writes punchier, more penetrating epigrams than almost anyone else out there commenting on modern life.

I don’t use a Kindle, so I haven’t seen the new book. But from the quality of Szasz’s previous works, I am sure that the Szasz Quotationary is an excellent value.

Here are some of my favorite epigrams from his previous books:

*People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend on them. Since they cannot do that, people choose to make the powerful virtuous, glorifying in becoming victimized by them.

*Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

*The self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.

*The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic –in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea –known to medical science is work

*In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

*Men often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and decency from a person who mistreats himself.

*The stupid neither forgive or forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

*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.