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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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Interpretation

What this quote means

True love can overcome aggressive and destructive behaviors in humans.

This quote by Wilhelm Reich suggests that the innate ability to love is a powerful force that can counteract the darker impulses of human nature, such as violence and sadism. By embracing and liberating our capacity for love, we can transcend our capacity for destruction and create a more harmonious existence both for ourselves and for others.

Themes

LoveLiberationHuman NatureSadismDestruction

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about the importance of compassion in society.

More from Wilhelm Reich

Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind. In other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept.
Wilhelm ReichRead
The working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are responsible for everything that takes place, the good things and the bad things. True enough, they suffer most from a war, but it is their apathy, craving for authority, etc., that is most responsible for making wars possible. It follows of necessity from this responsibility that the working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are capable of establishing lasting peace.
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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 you and outside of you.
Wilhelm ReichRead
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 ReichRead
There is no proof. There are no authorities whatever. No president, Academy, Court of Law, Congress or Senate on this earth has the knowledge or power to decide what will be the knowledge of tomorrow. There is no use in trying to prove something that is unknown to somebody who is ignorant of the unknown, or fearful of its threatening power. Only the good old rules of learning will eventually bring about understanding of what has invaded our earthly existence.
Wilhelm ReichRead
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 ReichRead

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as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.
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And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.
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No, no thought to the winnings. One loves because one loves.
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I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.
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He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ''For you a thousand times over!'' he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.
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Quote by Wilhelm Reich | QuoteProject