Top 77 Wilhelm Reich Quotes
#1. Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.
Wilhelm Reich
#2. The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
Wilhelm Reich
#3. Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
Wilhelm Reich
#4. The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other fact can.
Wilhelm Reich
#6. Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one's life well and happily ...
Wilhelm Reich
#7. Power, no matter what kind of power it is, without a foundation in truth, is a dictatorship, more or less and in one way or another, for it is always based on man's fear of the social responsibility and personal burden that "freedom" entails.
Wilhelm Reich
#8. We shall no longer hang on to the tails of public opinion or to a non- existent authority on matters utterly unknown and strange. We shall gradually become experts ourselves in the mastery of the knowledge of the Future.
Wilhelm Reich
#9. Revolutionary practice in any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development.
Wilhelm Reich
#10. The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural sexual gratification.
Wilhelm Reich
#11. Rooting in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going. And this makes politics and politicians.
Wilhelm Reich
#12. Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight; sham democracy is insidious.
Wilhelm Reich
#13. The elimination of individual capitalists and the replacement of private capitalism by state capitalism in Russia has not in the least altered the typical helpless and authoritarian character structure of the masses of people.
Wilhelm Reich
#14. Am I a Spaceman? Do I belong to a new race on earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with earth women?
Wilhelm Reich
#15. Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave.
Wilhelm Reich
#16. The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness.
Wilhelm Reich
#17. The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.
Wilhelm Reich
#18. Every muscular rigidity contains the history and the meaning of its origin.
Wilhelm Reich
#19. MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?
Wilhelm Reich
#20. Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is.
Wilhelm Reich
#21. Make it plain that you have no time for war, that you have more important things to do ... let the diplomats and marshals of the earth shoot each other.
Wilhelm Reich
#22. Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull.
Wilhelm Reich
#23. Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.
Wilhelm Reich
#25. I observe to the letter all laws that make sense but combat those that are obsolete or absurd.
Wilhelm Reich
#26. We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate eachother or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs.
Wilhelm Reich
#27. Fascism of the masses is nothing but disillusioned radicalism plus nationalistic philistinism
Wilhelm Reich
#28. Emotional and physical states can be altered by changing the breathing pattern.
Wilhelm Reich
#29. Social existence remains a dream only because the thoughts and feelings of the human animal are blocked off from the simple and obvious.
Wilhelm Reich
#30. Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology
Wilhelm Reich
#31. In recent times, more and more human thinking has come to assume that the idea of a universal natural law and the idea of 'God' are pointing to one and the same reality.
Wilhelm Reich
#32. If 'freedom' means, first of all, the responsibility of every individual for the rational determination of his own personal, professional and social existence, then there is no greater fear than that of the establishment of general freedom.
Wilhelm Reich
#33. You have no sense of your true duty, which is to be a man and preserve humanity. You imitate wise men so badly and bandits so well. Your movies and radio programs are full of murder.
Wilhelm Reich
#34. Sadistic brutality and mystical feeling go always hand in hand when the normal capacity for orgastic experience is lacking. This was as true of the inquisitors of the medieval church, of the cruel and mystical Philip II of Spain, as it is of any modern mass murderer.
Wilhelm Reich
#35. The sexual drive is nothing but the motor memory of previously remembered pleasure.
Wilhelm Reich
#36. Every seemingly arbitrary destructive action is a reaction of the organism to the frustration of a gratification of a vital need, especially of a sexual need.
Wilhelm Reich
#37. It is above all man's social position that decides whether he will sublimate his sadism as a butcher, surgeon, or policeman.
Wilhelm Reich
#38. Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs, and knowledge, but only with feelings and beliefs.
Wilhelm Reich
#39. Religiosity that is hostile to sex is the product of authoritarian society.
Wilhelm Reich
#40. Once we open up to the flow of energy within our body, we can also open up to the flow of energy in the universe.
Wilhelm Reich
#41. It is sexual energy which governs the structure of human feeling and thinking.
Wilhelm Reich
#42. It is the basic evasion of the essential which is the problem of man.
Wilhelm Reich
#43. The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.
Wilhelm Reich
#44. It is of the essence of any party to gain its orientation not from truths but from illusions which usually correspond to the irrational mass structure. Scientific truths only interfered with the habit of the party politicians of avoiding difficulties with the aid of illusions.
Wilhelm Reich
#45. Wilhelm Reich identified "armor" as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, "deadness". Functionally identical to muscular armor (chronic muscular spasms)
Wilhelm Reich
#46. If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible.
Wilhelm Reich
#47. Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.
Wilhelm Reich
#48. People should be _very_ careful when choosing the future fathers and mothers of their children. For that reason alone, it is extremely mean to demand a marriage certificate for life, just for one night of embracement.
Wilhelm Reich
#49. Only one thing matters: live a good, happy life. Do your heart's bidding, even when it leads you on paths that timid souls would avoid. Even when life is a torment, don't let it harden you.
Wilhelm Reich
#50. I do not believe that to be religious in the best, authentic sense a man has to destroy his love life and mummify himself, body and soul.
Wilhelm Reich
#51. Love, work and knowledge are the wellsprings of our life. They should also govern it. WILHELM REICH
Wilhelm Reich
#52. In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character.
Wilhelm Reich
#54. Work democracy does not wish to prevent or prohibit anything. Its only intention is the fulfilment of the biological life functions, of love, work and knowledge.
Wilhelm Reich
#55. The question of how and why the encrustations and rigidifications of human emotional life are brought about led directly into the realm of vegetative life.
Wilhelm Reich
#56. I do not believe that, in order to be religious in the good and genuine sense of the word, one has to ruin one's love life and has to become rigid and shrunken in body and soul.
Wilhelm Reich
#57. Not until man is willing to recognize his animal nature - in the good sense of the word - will he create genuine culture.
Wilhelm Reich
#58. The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.
Wilhelm Reich
#59. When social cooperation is disrupted, state power is always strengthened.
Wilhelm Reich
#60. Honest pioneer work in the field of science has always been, and will continue to be, life's pilot. On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation.
Wilhelm Reich
#61. I came to consider the instinct as nothing more than the "motor aspect of pleasure."
Wilhelm Reich
#62. The existence of strict moral principles has invariably
signified that the biological, and specifically the sexual
needs of man were not being satisfied. Every moral regulation is in itself sex-negating, and all compulsory morality is life-negating.
Wilhelm Reich
#63. See yourself as you really are. Listen to what none of your leaders and representatives dares tell you: You are a "little, common man." Understand the double meaning of these words: "little" and "common." Don't run. Have the courage to look at yourself!
Wilhelm Reich
#64. I am well aware of the fact that the human race has known about the existence of a universal energy related to life for many ages. However, the basic task of natural science consisted of making this energy usable. This is the sole difference between my work and all preceding knowledge.
Wilhelm Reich
#65. Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word "freedom" should ever be more than an empty political slogan.
Wilhelm Reich
#66. The discovery of orgone energy was made through consistent, thorough study of energy functions, first in the realm of the psyche, and later in the realm of biological functioning.
Wilhelm Reich
#67. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal.
Wilhelm Reich
#68. 'Mysticism' here means, in the literal sense, a change of sensory impressions and organ sensations into something unreal and beyond this world.
Wilhelm Reich
#69. It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power
Wilhelm Reich
#70. Because I'm a man who works, who knows what a human being is like inside, who knows that every human being has his worth, and who wants the world to be governed by work and not by opinions about work.
Wilhelm Reich
#71. The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses.
Wilhelm Reich
#72. It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This terrible Twentieth Century has made all cultural theories from Plato down seem ridiculous. Little man, there has never been a human culture.
Wilhelm Reich
#73. I know that what you call 'God' really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.
Wilhelm Reich
#74. Apartment houses, public transportation, and schools tell us something about the technical development of a society. They do not tell us whether the members of that society are suppressed subjects or free workers, whether they are rational or irrational men and women.
Wilhelm Reich
#75. The socially irresponsible man is the man absorbed in sexual conflicts.
Wilhelm Reich
#76. And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn't the courage to express
Wilhelm Reich
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