Quote

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

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Wilhelm Reich
Age: 60 †
Born: 1897
Born: March 24
Died: 1957
Died: November 3
Academic
Philosopher
Psychiatrist
Psychoanalyst
Sex Educator
Writer
Animal
Societies
Within
Machine
Made
Peaceful
Incomparably
Men
Basic
Sadistic
Like
Machines
Degenerate
Animals
Degenerates
Species
Distinct
Question
Fundamentally

More quotes by Wilhelm Reich

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In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character.
Wilhelm Reich
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Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
Wilhelm Reich
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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
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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
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The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other fact can.
Wilhelm Reich
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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
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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
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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
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Every muscular rigidity contains the history and the meaning of its origin.
Wilhelm Reich
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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
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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
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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
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Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.
Wilhelm Reich
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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
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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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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
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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
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The sexual drive is nothing but the motor memory of previously remembered pleasure.
Wilhelm Reich
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Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.
Wilhelm Reich
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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