A Quote by Thomas Szasz

Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.

Thomas Szasz

Quote Topics

Acts Behaving Better Defined How Interested Men More Punished Rewarded Than Themselves Why Why Me

Quote Author

Thomas Szasz
American - Psychologist
April 15, 1920 - September 8, 2012

I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves.

James Russell Lowell

Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.

Henry Ford

We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me why American men think that success is everything when they know that eighty percent of them are not going to succeed more than to just keep going and why if they are not why do they not keep on being interested in the things that interested them when they were college men and why American men different from English men do not get more interesting as they get older.

Gertrude Stein

Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.

Will Durant

Men are angry at women because they aren't doing what they are supposed to do, which is support men. They are in the workplace claiming their own rights and often outdoing men. They are daring to bring charges of sexual assault and harassment. They are just not behaving themselves!

Martha Nussbaum

The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.

Plato

It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men's property, which they had not before, as individuals. And whenever any number of men, calling themselves a government, do anything to another man, or to his property, which they had no right to do as individuals, they thereby declare themselves trespassers, robbers, or murderers, according to the nature of their acts.

Lysander Spooner

men have their cake and get to eat it too, for while they decree themselves as representative of humanity, women who argue that men are not, are simply showing how little they know! And when men's standards are defined as human standards, then women who assert that women are different, demonstrate how 'inhuman' they are. It is a real 'Catch 22.

Dale Spender

I cannot speak so confidently about the fighting qualities of the Eastern men, or what are called Yankees - not knowing myself particularly to whom the appellation belongs - but this I do know - if the Southerners think that man for man they are better than our Illinois men, or western men generally, they will discover themselves in a grievous mistake.

Abraham Lincoln

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Females make better cooks than men. Females have a better palate. They have a better sense of smell. They never take shortcuts; this is why they're very good in kitchens. The weakness in what they do is they are not as physically strong as men, so they're never really given the opportunity.

Marco Pierre White

Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit to be a much better thing than experience; which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken; for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and ineffective.

Lord Chesterfield

When a bee stings, she dies. She cannot sting and live. When men sting, their better selves die. Every sting kills a better instinct. Men must not turn bees and kill themselves in stinging others.

Francis Bacon

Women aren't interested in being sexy any more and men are. All the guys have objectified themselves and sexualised themselves into being just matinee idols.