Top 80 Wilhelm Reich Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Fascism is the frenzy of sexual cripples.”

— Wilhelm Reich

2. “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

3. “It is sexual energy which governs the structure of human feeling and thinking.”

— Wilhelm Reich

4. “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

5. “Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.”

— Wilhelm Reich

6. “Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology.”

— Wilhelm Reich

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Emotional and physical states can be altered by changing the breathing pattern.”

— Wilhelm Reich

13. “In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character.”

— Wilhelm Reich

14. “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

15. “Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.”

— Wilhelm Reich

16. “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

17. “The fascist mentality is a mentality of the subjugated “little man” who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time.”

— Wilhelm Reich

18. “The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it.”

— Wilhelm Reich

19. “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

20. “Never force anything, just let it be natural, and it will always be okay. Okay?”

— Wilhelm Reich

21. “Love is the absence of Anxiety.”

— Wilhelm Reich

22. “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

23. “Every muscular rigidity contains the history and the meaning of its origin.”

— Wilhelm Reich

24. “This idealization of motherhood is essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual repression, of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation would mean its collapse.”

— Wilhelm Reich

25. “Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs, and knowledge, but only with feelings and beliefs.”

— Wilhelm Reich

26. “I observe to the letter all laws that make sense but combat those that are obsolete or absurd.”

— Wilhelm Reich

27. “Only you yourself can be your liberator!”

— Wilhelm Reich

28. “Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave.”

— Wilhelm Reich

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Not until man is willing to recognize his animal nature – in the good sense of the word – will he create genuine culture.”

— Wilhelm Reich

32. “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

33. “The institution of marriage would be damaged. Ideologically, marital morality must be kept intact, in spite of the contradictory facts of sexual life, because marriage is the backbone of the authoritarian family, which in turn is the breeding ground for authoritarian ideologies and character structure.”

— Wilhelm Reich

34. “The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses.”

— Wilhelm Reich

35. “The word fascism is not a word of abuse any more than the word capitalism is. It is a concept denoting a very definite kind of mass leadership and mass influence: authoritarian, one-party system, hence totalitarian, a system in which power takes priority over objective interests, and facts are distorted for political purposes. Hence, there are “fascist Jews,” just as there are “fascist Democrats.”

— Wilhelm Reich

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “I’m afraid of you, little man, very much afraid, because the future of mankind depends on you. I’m afraid of you because your main aim in life is to escape – from yourself.”

— Wilhelm Reich

40. “Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight; sham democracy is insidious.”

— Wilhelm Reich

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Open confession of dictatorship is far less dangerous than sham democracy. One can defend oneself against the former; the latter is like a creeper attached to the body of a drowning man.”

— Wilhelm Reich

46. “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

47. “A living being does not fire blindly without knowing at what he is shooting and for what reason. Life had to have died within those who did so. This was not changed by the fact that the machines moved spontaneously, mechanically. If these mechanical men did not exist there would be no war. But how did they work? What controlled their actions? Who created them and why? How could living beings degenerate thus?”

— Wilhelm Reich

48. “The future of the human race depends on your thoughts and actions. But your teachers and masters don’t tell you how you really think and what you really are; no one dares to confront you with the one truth that might make you the unswerving master of your fate. You are “free” in only one respect: free from the self-criticism that might help you to govern your own life.”

— Wilhelm Reich

49. “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

50. “Originally and naturally, sexual pleasure was the good, the beautiful, the happy, that which united man with nature in general. When sexual feelings and religious feelings became separated from one another, that which is sexual was forced to become the bad, the internal, the diabolical.”

— Wilhelm Reich