The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.

When the psychiatrist approves of a person's actions, he judges that person to have acted with "free choice"; when he disapproves,he judges him to have acted without "free choice." It is small wonder that people find "free choice" a confusing idea: "free choice" appears to refer to what the person being judged (often called the "patient") does, whereas it is actually what the person making the judgment (often a psychiatrist or other mental health worker) thinks.

Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.

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.

I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in the condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male.

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.