145 Quotes by Wilhelm Reich

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.

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.

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.

The socially irresponsible man is the man absorbed in sexual conflicts.

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.

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.

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.

Truth is dangerous when it concerns you.

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