Wilhelm Reich on health

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

Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.

You are afraid of life, Little Man, deadly afraid. You will murder it in the belief of doing it for the sake of “socialism,” or “the state,” or “national honor,” or “the glory of God.”

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007Preface (p. xi)

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.

Mark Twain1835–1910“Following the Equator: Pudd’s ahead Wilson’s New Calendar”, as quoted in Medicine in Quotations: Views of Health and Disease Through the Ages (2006), p. 146

The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.

Marcel Proust1871–1922