"Heresy means to choose. The person who chooses 'wrongly' is a heretic; yet heretics, since the beginning of time, have existed in all societies. The result has been an endless conflict between holders of power, whose business it is to rule, and the individual, whose business it is to free himself from arbitrary authority. It is this personal human conflict -- between power and knowledge, authority and reason, the collective and the individual -- which noted psychiatrist Thomas Szasz explores in Heresies. In the same biting but often humorous vein as in The Second Sin, Dr. Szask illuminates the contractions and fallacies that make up our contemporary attitudes toward sex and marriage, freedom and punishment, law and morals, medicine and psychiatry. These aphorism expose many of our modern beliefs and practices to be as self-serving and inhuman as those of the medieval Christians, who, out of fear of the Devil, burned witches at the stake"--Back cover.