80 quotes
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!"
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
My discovery of the Life Energy is today widely known nearly all over the globe, in hundreds of institutions, whether acclaimed or cursed. It can no longer be stopped by anyone, no matter what happens to me.
Response to FDA complaint (1954)
It is the mechanistic-mystical character of modern man that produces fascist parties, and not vice versa.
The result of erroneous political thinking is that even today fascism is conceived as a specific national characteristic of the Germans or the Japanese.
This is a painful bit of truth: Fascism, in the form of irresponsibility, is present in the masses of all countries, nations and races. Fascism is the result of thousands of years of warping of the human structure. It could have developed in any nation. It is not a specific German or Italian character trait. It works in every mortal.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
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.
The Function of the Orgasm (1927)
A shoemaker who loses himself in mystical ecstasy and begins to think of himself as a saviour of the people, sent by God, will inevitably cut the soles the wrong way and mess up his stitches. As time goes on, he will be faced with starvation. It is precisely by this process, on the other hand, that the politician becomes strong and rich.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
It was seeing the science-fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, about a spaceman who comes to Earth in a flying saucer to save us from self-destruction in a nuclear war.
Contact with Space (1957)
You worship the Christ child. The Christ child was born of a mother who had no marriage certificate. What you worship in the Christ child, you poor little marriage-ridden man, is your own yearning for sexual freedom!
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
The kindly individual believes that all people are kindly and act accordingly. The plague individual believes that all people lie, swindle, steal and crave power. Clearly, then, the living is at a disadvantage and in danger.
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
What is new in work democracy is: that for the first time in the history of sociology, a possible future regulation of human society is derived not from ideologies or conditions that must be created, but from natural processes that have been present and have been developing from the very beginning.
Nature and culture, instinct and morality, sexuality and achievement become incompatible as a result of the split in the human structure. 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 (orgastic) sexual gratification.
The Function of the Orgasm (1927)
Political irrationalism which infests, deforms and destroys our lives, is — in the strictly psychiatric sense — a perversion of social life, caused by the ostracizing of the natural life functions and by their exclusion from the determination of social life.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when your thinking will be in harmony with your feelings; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license.
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
You will no longer believe that you "don't count." You will know and advocate your knowledge that you are the bearer of human society. Don't run away. Don't be afraid. It is not so terrible to be the responsible bearer of human society.
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
The Old and the New Testament can be appreciated as stupendous achievements of the human mind, but this appreciation should not be used to suppress sexuality. My medical experience has taught me that adolescents who are sexually sick have an unhealthy appreciation of the legend of Jesus.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
It is known from the treatment of mentally sick priests that an involuntary ejaculation often occurs at the height of religious ecstasy. Normal orgastic gratification is replaced by a general condition of physical excitation, which excludes the genitals and, as if by accident, brings about a partial release against one’s will.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
Catholic Christianity in particular has long since divested itself of the revolutionary, i.e., rebellious, character of the primitive Christian movement. It seduces its millions of devotees into accepting war as an act of fate, as a ‘punishment of sin’. Wars are indeed the consequences of sins, but entirely different sins from those conceived of by Catholicism.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
I have never heard you complain: "You promote me to be the future master of myself and the world, but you don't tell me how one is to be the master of oneself, and you don't tell me the mistakes in my thinking and my actions."
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
You let men in power assume power "for the Little Man". But you yourself remain silent. You give men in power or impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent you. Only too late do you realize that again and again you are being defrauded.
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
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.