Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Szasz

Szasz is needling a moral double standard that modern life runs on: society loves obligation when it points outward, and grows suspicious the moment it points inward. The line is built like a trap. First, he frames “duty” as symmetrical - to others, to oneself - then shows how the culture grades those duties on a curve. Reliability becomes a social reward for self-erasure. “Selfish” becomes the scarlet letter for self-direction.

The subtext is less about personal virtue than about social control. Calling someone “reliable” often means they’re legible, compliant, and available to be scheduled, tasked, or guilted. “Selfish,” in this framing, is a political adjective masquerading as a moral one: it polices boundaries. Szasz’s move is classic contrarian psychology, turning the therapeutic era’s language of care back onto the caretakers and institutions that benefit from perpetual caretaking.

Context matters. Szasz spent his career attacking coercive psychiatry and the way “help” can become a euphemism for enforcing norms. Read through that lens, this quote isn’t a generic self-care slogan; it’s an indictment of systems - family, workplace, even medicine - that sanctify sacrifice and pathologize autonomy. It also hints at how “duty to self” gets misread: tending to your own needs isn’t the absence of ethics, but the refusal to let your life be administered by other people’s expectations.

What makes it work is its chilly clarity. Two parallel sentences, two opposing verdicts, and suddenly “selfish” looks less like a sin than a label applied when you stop being useful.