Jews From The United States

"There comes a time, not too long into the journey to God, when the realization that the world could work beautifully if we would give it the chance, begins to excite us. It becomes our new motivation."

"If we’re not working in order to get rich, then why are we working at all? What are we supposed to do all day? Just sit home and watch TV? Not at all, but thinking so is a temporary phase many people go through — when the values of the old world no longer have a hold on us, but the values of the new don’t yet grab your soul. They will."

"The thought system that dominates our culture is laced with selfish values, and relinquishing those values is a lot easier said than done. The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years we may have worked for power, money and prestige. Now all of a sudden we’ve learned that those are just the values of a dying world. We don’t know where to search for motivation anymore."

"Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn't mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don't apply to them."

"Polonsky, along with Chaplin and Losey, remains one of the great casualties of the anti-Communist hysteria of the fifties."

"Twenty-one years between first and second films is longer than any director should have to wait. The case of Polonsky is one of the most dismal hangovers from the McCarthy period."

"Indians don't last in prison. They weren't born for it like the whites."

"What you doin' with such a big ol' dog in New York?" "Never had a wife."

"Yeah, yeah, I know I got rid of the headache. Now I got cancer."

"What do you mean "gangsters"? It's business."

"What are you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies."

"It was a great pleasure to make a movie again. Nothing is better; perhaps revolution, but there you have to succeed and be right, dangers which never attach themselves to making movies, and dreaming."

"First of all, directing is an idea that you have of a total flow of images that are going on, which are incidentally actors, words, and objects in space. It's an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That's what directing is."

"Smart, and Gets Things Done"

"If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work."

"Full service brokers, in this day and age of low cost mutual funds and discount brokers, are really nothing more than machines for ripping off retail investors."

"People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful."

"Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now.""

"Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them."

"The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way."

"I got a job at Metro and went in to see Louis Mayer, who told me he wanted me to be a producer. I said I wanted to write and direct. He said, "No, you have to produce first, you have to crawl before you can walk." Which is as good a definition of producing as I ever heard."

"Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script."

"I am never quite sure whether I am one of the cinema's elder statesmen or just the oldest whore on the beat."

"I have a lot to be sad about. Not bitter in any way. But I think it can be fairly said that I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture."

"Work democracy is the natural process of love, work and knowledge which has always governed economy and the social and cultural life of man and always will, as long as there is a human society. Work democracy is the sum total of all naturally developed and developing life functions which organically govern rational human relationships."

"Reich believed that, from the time of birth, everyone is endowed with the sexual capacity which is necessary to maintain a stable energy level in the organism and prevent stasis."

"Reich believed that we needed to develop a whole new concept of sexuality. He viewed the body as an energy system in a constant state of expansion and contraction or pulsation (seen most easily, in the pulse and respiration)."

"Reich found in his research among the youth that only one-third were emotionally prepared for a sexual life, and one-third needed considerable information and counseling, while the remaining third required extensive therapy. It 's true that the majority of youth today have grown up with a better attitude toward sex but most without sufficient responsibility toward it."

"Reich could only conclude that sex, which was formerly believed to be solely for reproductive purposes, had the vitally important function of maintaining a stable energy level within the organism."

"In the Polyclinic, Reich had the opportunity to study, with his students, hundreds of patients who came for treatment and to evaluate Freud's assertion that, when the unconscious conflicts were made conscious, the symptoms disappeared. He found that this did not always occur. Some of the most thoroughly analyzed cases remained in their neurotic morass or relapsed shortly. The problem then was to find out why. What factor was missing in the uncured cases that must be present in the cured ones? This factor proved to be that the latter had attained a satisfying sexual life, while the former had not. During analysis, symptoms frequently improved when the patient had a satisfying sexual experience or even masturbated with pleasure. Genital release was, therefore, necessary to maintain health. This did not mean that the uncured cases remained in abstinence, as many of them did have a sexual life. At that time, analysts simply took the patient's word for it that his sexual life was adequate and refrained from detailed probing. Reich found that all these patients suffered from sexual inadequacy consisting of premature ejaculation or orgastic impotence in the male and anesthesia or absence of orgasm in the female. The cured cases regularly achieved a pleasurable orgasm with total involvement of the body. This brought in the quantitative factor of discharge of libido or excess energy. This was significant, as it meant that the libido, which Freud had postulated as a psychic concept, is a reality. The libido must be a real energy which, unless discharged at more or less regular intervals, increases in the body, causing tension, and exciting the vegetative and vasomotor systems, causing nervousness, irritability, and other symptoms."

"Reich was originally a strict Freudian and accepted Freud's theories, particularly regarding the libidinal development through the oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages and the concept of psychic energy. This concept holds that an individual is born with a given amount of psychic energy so that, the more it is bound up in fixation and repression at the various stages of growth, the less remains free for adult adjustment. Reich, I however, came to disagree with Freud on two important issues. Freud believed that culture and instinct were antithetical and that the baby was born with both libidinal and destructive drives. He believed, thus, that the destructive drive legitimately required repression for an orderly society and that, in the last analysis, society was correct in imposing such restrictions - otherwise, there would be chaos. Reich believed that the baby was born without destructive drives and with only the primary libidinal (love) drive, and that he was capable of regulating himself if allowed to function naturally. He believed that the destructive drives were a result of the repression of the libido, which then built up tension and pressure that could express themselves only forcefully and brutally. In this view, society is wrong in restricting the natural drives of the child, for it thus forces on him irrational and neurotic behavior. To Freud, psychic energy (or the libido) was simply a working hypothesis. Reich believed it was a real energy that required adequate discharge in order for a person to avoid the buildup of tension. He, eventually, was able to demonstrate this energy experimentally. If repression occurred, this energy was held back in muscular contraction (the armor). The contraction of the musculature tended to restrict and immobilize the body and became the somatic core of neuroses, making full orgastic discharge impossible."

"Wilhelm Reich has been incredibly misunderstood and maligned, and almost everything he has written has been misinterpreted. Particularly is this true of his sexual theories. The usual distortion is that he advocated "free" sexual expression - "obey that impulse" - amounting to a wild and frantic promiscuity ever seeking a mystical, ecstatic orgasm that is supposed to cure all neuroses and even physical ills. This could, presumably, be accomplished by sufficient practice and knowledge, and it would free everyone of his inhibitions and repressions. In order to achieve this end and, incidentally, to satisfy their own countertransference needs, Reich and his followers were said to masturbate their patients and to have sexual relations with them. (It was never explicitly stated whether homosexual relations were included; if not, then half of the patients must have felt neglected.) In any event, they conjured up an exceptional sexual prowess and lack of discrimination on the part of Reich and his followers. This distortion, of course, came from the sex-starved neurotic longing of some of the reviewers and readers of orgonomic literature, and surprisingly, even more from those who knew nothing of Reich and his writings. It was not based on anything Reich ever wrote or practiced. Actually, medical orgonomy as developed by Reich is a rather puritanical discipline. [Footnote 1] True, not entirely in keeping with the social mores of armored man, but puritanical nevertheless."

"He had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government. Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned. Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue. When I started studying Reich's works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I'm not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation."

"I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous."

"Dr. Wilhelm Reich was condemned for unscientific claims by the Food and Drug Administration in 1956 because of his theories about sexual freedom and his discovery of an alleged "orgone" energy. He quickly became the most world-famous victim of the FDA's quest to impose One True Faith on medical practice in the United States, because the Feds not only destroyed all the equipment in Dr. Reich's experimental laboratory but burned all his books, too, in an incinerator, and then they put him in jail where he died of a heart attack. Since many disapprove of this unconstitutional way of silencing heresy, Dr. Reich has remained a center of controversy. … In addition to his bio-physical heresies, Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen — a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes — causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want tyrants."

"(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything". Martin Gardner produces the same feeling."

"I tried the accumulators, but I didn't feel anything. The Doctor would ask me about it — "You still don't feel anything, "Mr. Ross?" — and I'd say, "Maybe it's like Christian Science, you have to believe in it." Then he'd say, "You don't see us praying here, do you?""

"He was a friendly man … he didn't act higher than you. You could talk to him, joke with him. Except when he was working. Then no interruptions."

"A woman stopped by Orgonon to meet the man she said had saved her life. She had been diagnosed as having incurable cancer, she told Reich; accepting her fate, she had put her affairs in order and decided to enjoy what life was left to her. But then she heard about his accumulator and tried it. Now the cancer was gone. Ross says that Reich listened to the woman's story, then told her bluntly: "I didn't save your life. You changed your life when you thought you were going to die. You started to have fun, to let out the things you had kept pressed down inside you. You saved your life." Ross paused and looked sad for the only time in the interview. "I can't see to this day," he said, "how the FDA called that man a fraud.""

"On top of the world, Looking over the edge, You could see them coming. You looked too small In their big, black car, To be a threat to the men in power."

"Nothing can change as long as man is armored, since every misery stems from man's armoring and immobility which creates the fear of living, motile living. The orgonomic approach is neither political nor sociological alone; it is not psychological; it grew out of the criticism and correction of the psychological assumptions of psychoanalysis of an absolute unconscious, of the unconscious being the ultimate giveness in man, etc., and out of the introduction of bio-psychiatry into socio-economic thinking. It is biological and biosocial, resting on the discovery of the Cosmic Energy. p. 300"

"The fact that Freud did not offer any scientific proof for the libido theory, even though he predicted it would be forthcoming, and the attenuation that resulted from his later speculations, left his disciples with little to sustain them. As a result, they have gradually abdicated, despite some idolatrical lip service in their theoretical discussions — "a formal obeisance to the past" — and they have offered little, if any, opposition to the concerted effort now being directed against the energy theory, the most viable aspect of Freudian psychoanalysis. p. n9"

"I left behind me an age which had finally got hold of a little corner of the Freudian thought system, but had completely thrown overboard Freud's courage to stand alone, his adherence to some basic truth, his penetrating sense of what is right regardless— in other words, the complete abandonment of basic research of human emotions to petty little nuisance considerations such as career, easy money, easy recognition by institutions which owed their very existence to the evasion of the very facts of life they pretended, falsely, to disclose. p. n4"

"I had directed drawpipes, connected with the deep well, toward an ordinary star, and the start had faded out four times. There was no mistake about it. Three more people had seen it. There was only one conclusion: The thing we had drawn from was not a star. It was something else; a UFO."

"Easy contact was made on that fateful day with what obviously turned out to be a heretofore unknown type of UFO. I had hesitated for weeks to turn my cloudbuster pipes toward a "star," as if I had known that some of the blinking lights hanging in the sky were not planets or fixed stars but SPACE machines. With the fading out of the two "stars," the cloudbuster had suddenly changed into a SPACEGUN. From then onward, too, our approach to the problem of space became positive, affirmative, confident in using our carefully screened data."

"It is not beyond actual possibilities that men from outer space have landed (or will in the future land) on earth and have begun to breed here for whatever reason they may have had."

"On March 20, 1956, 10 P.M. a thought of a very remote possibility entered my mind, which I fear will never leave me again. Am I a spaceman? Do I belong to a new race on earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with earth women? Are my children offspring of the first interplanetary race? Has the melting-pot of interplanetary society already been created on our own planet, as the melting-pot of all earth nations was established in the U.S.A. 190 years ago? … What inspired this thought? 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. … All through the film I had a distinct impression that it was a bit of "my story" which was depicted there, even the actor's expressions and looks reminded me and others of myself as I had appeared 15 to 20 years ago."

"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."

"Inquiry in the realm of Basic Natural Law is outside the judicial domain of this or ANY OTHER KIND OF SOCIAL ADMINISTRATION ANYWHERE ON THIS GLOBE, IN ANY LAND, NATION, OR REGION. 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. 11px|frameless QOTD 2007·11·03 Sound file"

"The present critical state of international human affairs requires security and safety from nuisance interferences with efforts toward full, honest, determined clarification of man's relationship to nature within and without himself; in other words, his relationship to the Law of Nature. It is not permissible, either morally, legally, or factually, to force a natural scientist to expose his scientific results and methods of basic research in court. This point is accentuated in a world crisis where biopathic men hold in their hands power over ruined, destitute multitudes."