Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Szasz

Szasz takes a nursery-room moral and flips it into an indictment of adult self-deception. The first clause nods to the familiar rule-book ethics most people can recite on cue; the second clause exposes what we actually do under pressure: treat morality as raw material for storytelling. The line lands because it’s structured like a proverb but weaponized like a diagnosis. You can hear the pivot-click from “right” to “excuse” - a neat little linguistic trapdoor that drops the reader from ideal principles into messy social reality.

The intent isn’t just to scold revenge. It’s to spotlight the social function of wrongdoing: not merely an act, but a justification engine. “Two wrongs” suggests symmetry and fairness, the seductive logic of payback. “A good excuse” names the real prize - permission. Once someone else has crossed a line, our retaliation can dress up as balance, defense, even virtue. Szasz is pointing at the moral laundering that turns spite into “standing up for myself” and cruelty into “teaching a lesson.”

Context matters: Szasz spent a career criticizing the ways institutions (especially psychiatry and law) convert judgments into sanctioned narratives. In his world, “excuse” isn’t a throwaway word; it’s a political technology. People and systems alike reach for prior harm to reduce responsibility, to justify coercion, to reframe choices as inevitabilities. The cynicism is clinical: the problem isn’t that we fail to know the rule. The problem is that we’re talented at using the rule’s breach as cover for our next breach.