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 down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you're a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognized neither Mann nor Sinclair. You recognize only the heavyweight champion and Al Capone. If given your choice between a library and a fight, you'll undoubtedly go to the fight.

— 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

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

— Wilhelm Reich

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

— Wilhelm Reich

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 orgasmic 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

One cannot equate "capitalism" and "democracy.

— Wilhelm Reich

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

— 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

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 numskull.

— Wilhelm Reich

Sadistic brutality and mystical feeling always go hand in hand when the normal capacity for orgasmic experience is lacking. This was as true of the inquisitors of the medieval church, of the cruel and mystical Philip II of Spain, as it is of any modern mass murderer.

— Wilhelm Reich