Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.

Like fast-food chains, child psychiatric inpatient units and the wholesale psychiatric drugging of children, in and out of hospitals, are recent...and remarkably popular products and practices.

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

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.

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.