73+ Wilhelm Reich Quotes On Religion, War And Death

Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst and a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud. He developed a theory of character structure and a technique of character analysis that focused on the individual's ability to experience and express their true feelings. He was also a noted social theorist who wrote extensively on the connection between sexual repression and the authoritarianism of the state. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Wilhelm Reich on religion, leadership, war.

Top 10 Wilhelm Reich Quotes

1. 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.
2. Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.
3. Every muscular rigidity contains the history and the meaning of its origin.
4. The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.
5. Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.
6. 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...
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. It is above all man's social position that decides whether he will sublimate his sadism as a butcher, surgeon, or policeman.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Only you yourself can be your liberator!
• Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave.
• The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.
• The sexual drive is nothing but the motor memory of previously remembered pleasure.
• It is the basic evasion of the essential which is the problem of man.
• Emotional and physical states can be altered by changing the breathing pattern.
• It is sexual energy which governs the structure of human feeling and thinking.
• Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
• I observe to the letter all laws that make sense but combat those that are obsolete or absurd.
• Fascism is the frenzy of sexual cripples.

Wilhelm Reich Quotes About Love

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

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

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

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

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

Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our lives, they should also govern it. — Wilhelm Reich

Love is the absence of Anxiety. — Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich Quotes About Work

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

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

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

Wilhelm Reich Quotes About Living

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

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

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

Wilhelm Reich Quotes About Life

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

On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation. — Wilhelm Reich

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

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

Wilhelm Reich Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind. In other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept. — Wilhelm Reich

In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. . . The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety. — Wilhelm Reich

A living creature develops a destructive impulse when it wants to destroy a source of danger... The original motive is not pleasure in destruction... I destroy in a dangerous situation because I want to live and do not want to have any anxiety. In short, the impulse to destroy serves a primary biological will to live. — Wilhelm Reich

Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act. It is founded upon the healthy character attitude of the individual's capacity for love. Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love. — Wilhelm Reich

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

You think the end justifies the means, however vile. I tell you: the end is the means by which you achieve it. Today's step is tomorrow's life. Great ends cannot be attained by base means. You've proved that in all your social upheavals. The meanness and inhumanity of the means make you mean and inhuman and make the end unattainable. — Wilhelm Reich

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

The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses. — Wilhelm Reich

No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. — Wilhelm Reich

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

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

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

Your liberators tell you that that your suppressors are Wilhelm, Nikolaus, Pope Gregory the Twenty Eighth, Morgan, Krupp or Ford. And your "liberators" are called Mussolini, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin. I tell you: "Only you yourself can be your liberator!" — Wilhelm Reich

The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other fact can. — Wilhelm Reich

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

Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs, and knowledge, but only with feelings and beliefs. — Wilhelm Reich

You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man. — Wilhelm Reich

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

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. — Wilhelm Reich

The working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are responsible for everything that takes place, the good things and the bad things. True enough, they suffer most from a war, but it is their apathy, craving for authority, etc., that is most responsible for making wars possible. It follows of necessity from this responsibility that the working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are capable of establishing lasting peace. — Wilhelm Reich

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

Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently. — Wilhelm Reich

Not until man is willing to recognize his animal nature - in the good sense of the word - will he create genuine culture. — Wilhelm Reich

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

And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn't the courage to express — Wilhelm Reich

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

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

The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness. — Wilhelm Reich

Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology — Wilhelm Reich

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

You yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day. You think the goal justifies the means, even the vile means. You are wrong: The goal is in the path on which you arrive at it. Every step of today is your life of tomorrow. No great goal can be reached by vile means. That you have proven in every social revolution. The vileness or inhumanity of the path to the goal makes you vile or inhuman, and the goal unattainable. — Wilhelm Reich

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

Life Lessons by Wilhelm Reich

1. Wilhelm Reich believed that emotional health was essential for physical health and encouraged people to express their feelings in a healthy way.
2. He also advocated for the importance of personal freedom and autonomy, and encouraged people to break away from oppressive social norms.
3. Finally, he believed that it was important to take responsibility for one's own life and to be honest with oneself.