“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.”

“Since it might appear unusual that a bio-psychiatrist should work as an expert in the realm of non-living nature, I believe it will be helpful to give the following summary:My present work began in the realm of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, with natural scientific investigations of the energy at work in human emotions.This led to the discovery of the bio-energy in the living organism, termed organismic orgone energy; and further to the discovery of the same type of a basically physical orgone energy in the atmosphere.Orgonomy is not psychiatry, but the science of biophysics of the emotions, thus also including psychiatry, and physics in the realm of basic cosmic orgone energy.It is not mysticism, but natural scientific, experimental investigation, also of mystical emotions and experiences.Orgone energy is energy before matter (not after matter, as is atomic energy). It is studied by means of Geiger-Müller Counters and other physical instruments.It follows entirely new, hitherto unknown functional laws of nature, and not the well known mechanical laws of electricity, heat, or mechanics.”

“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 becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats...”

“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 actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.”

“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 not by opinions about work.”

“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.”

“The question of how and why the encrustations and rigidifications of human emotional life are brought about led directly into the realm of vegetative life.”