Top 80 Wilhelm Reich Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “When social cooperation is disrupted, state power is always strengthened.”

— Wilhelm Reich

54. “And first and foremost, think straight, trust the quiet inner voice that tells you what to do. You hold your life in your hands, don’t entrust it to anyone else, least of all to your chosen leaders. BE YOURSELF! Any number of great men have told you that.”

— Wilhelm Reich

55. “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

56. “The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other fact can.”

— Wilhelm Reich

57. “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

58. “And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn’t the courage to express.”

— Wilhelm Reich

59. “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

60. “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

61. “Politically, we are still stuck in the systems of thought of the Greek and Roman slave states, no matter how much we rant about “democracy.”

— Wilhelm Reich

62. “It is above all man’s social position that decides whether he will sublimate his sadism as a butcher, surgeon, or policeman.”

— Wilhelm Reich

63. “It is the basic evasion of the essential which is the problem of man.”

— Wilhelm Reich

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “Most of what official adolescent psychology considers the “characteristics of puberty,” turn out in character-analytic work to be the artificially produced effect of obstructed natural sexuality. This holds true for daydreaming as well as for inferiority feelings.”

— Wilhelm Reich

70. “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

71. “One cannot equate “capitalism” and “democracy.”

— Wilhelm Reich

72. “You don’t believe that your friend could ever do anything great. You despise yourself in secret, even – no, especially – when you stand on your dignity; and since you despise yourself, you are unable to respect your friend. You can’t bring yourself to believe that anyone you have sat at table with, or shared a house with, is capable of great achievement. That is why all great men have been solitary. It is hard to think in your company, little man. One can only think ‘about’ you, or ‘for your benefit’, not ‘with’ you, for you stifle all big, generous ideas.”

— Wilhelm Reich

73. “Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.”

— Wilhelm Reich

74. “The sexual drive is nothing but the motor memory of previously remembered pleasure.”

— Wilhelm Reich

75. “The socially irresponsible man is the man absorbed in sexual conflicts.”

— Wilhelm Reich

76. “The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.”

— Wilhelm Reich

77. “Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.”

— Wilhelm Reich

78. “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

79. “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

80. “On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation.”

— Wilhelm Reich

81. “Truth is dangerous when it concerns you.”

— Wilhelm Reich

82. “How, then,′ I hear you ask, ‘shall I attain my end, whether it be Christian love, socialism, or American democracy?’ Your Christian love and your socialism and your American democracy are what you do each day, your manner of thinking each hour, of embracing your life companion and loving your child; they are your attitude of social responsibility towards your work, and your determination not to become like the crushers of life you so hate.”

— Wilhelm Reich

83. “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

84. “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

85. “Mystical organizations are only a crystallization of facts which can be found, in a more diffuse and less tangible form, in all strata of people. The degree of mystical, sentimental and sadistic feelings corresponds exactly to the degree of the disturbance of natural orgastic experience. Close observation of the audience of a trashy thriller or of a boxing match teaches more about these problems than a hundred handbooks of sexology.”

— Wilhelm Reich

86. “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

87. “In real man, the “god-given” genital embrace has turned into the pornographic 4-lettering male-female intercourse.”

— Wilhelm Reich