Gradually it became clear that it is a fundamental error to try to give the sexual act a psychological interpretation, to attribute to it a psychic meaning as if it were a neurotic symptom. But...

The ‘stiff, dead, retracted pelvis’ is one of man’s most frequent vegetative disturbances. It is responsible for lumbago as well as for hemorrhoidal disturbances. Elsewhere, we shall demonstrate an important connection between these disturbances and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I want you to stop being subhuman and become ‘yourself’. ‘Yourself,’ I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor’s opinion, but ‘yourself.’ I know, and you don’t, what you really are deep...

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.

I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague...

You’ll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven’s or Bach’s music...

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...

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...

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...

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

Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I’m right. “Migratory cancer cells” are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of...

What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That’s what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You’re...

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

Build your house on granite. By granite I mean your nature that you are torturing to death, the love in your child’s body, your wife’s dream of love, your own dream of life when you...

‘Mysticism’ here means, in the literal sense, a change of sensory impressions and organ sensations into something unreal and beyond this world.

For twenty-five years I’ve been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles...

The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.

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.

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

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...

The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature.The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand...

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...

Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws...

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave,...

Fui acusado de ser um utópico, de querer eliminar o desprazer do mundo e defender apenas o prazer. Contudo, tenho declarado claramente que a educação tradicional torna as pessoas incapazes para o prazer encouraçando-as contra...

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.

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

A vida brota a partir de milhares de fontes vibrantes, entrega-se à todos que a agarram, recusa-se a ser expressa em frases tediosas, aceita apenas ações transparentes, palavras verdadeiras e o prazer do amor

You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and...

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...

Wilhelm Reich identified ‘armor’ as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, ‘deadness’. Functionally...

It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand...