“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.”

—  Wilhelm Reich

Contact with Space (1957)
Context: 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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It was seeing the science-fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, about a spaceman who comes to Earth in a flying s…" by Wilhelm Reich?
Wilhelm Reich photo
Wilhelm Reich 89
Austrian-American psychoanalyst 1897–1957

Related quotes

George Adamski photo

“From then on, anyone who said ‘I have seen a flying saucer’ or, worse, ‘I believe in flying saucers’ was considered... a crank.”

George Adamski (1891–1965) American ufologist

Flying Saucers Have Landed

Susan Sontag photo

“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

"The Imagination of Disaster" from Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 212
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo

“Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)
Context: Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?
If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.
This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.

Iain Banks photo

“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer
Juliet Marillier photo

“Our strength comes from that magic, from the earth and the sky, from the fire and the water. Fly high, swim deep, give back to the earth what she gives you…”

Juliet Marillier book Daughter of the Forest

Source: Daughter of the Forest

Neal Stephenson photo

“The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

A.E. Housman photo

“These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

No. 37 ("Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries").
Last Poems http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8lspm10.txt (1922)

William Jennings Bryan photo

“In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane — the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times a bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

Summation
Scopes Trial (1925), Summations

Nayef Al-Rodhan photo

“Just like the threat of mutually assured destruction from nuclear weapons, an extensive war in space would make space useless, and the decisions taken today will influence the use of space for many generations to come.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Meta-Geopolitics of Outer Space - (2012) p.285

Ralph Vary Chamberlin photo

“When we see men still so unhappily bound with prejudice and tradition that they are blind to the beauties and light of the grandest conception that science has yet won for man, we sorrow, and in sympathy again recall the plea that the unhappy Castelli made to the pope who was about to inflict punishment upon Galileo for his demonstration of the movements of the earth: "Your Holiness, nothing that can be done can now hinder the earth from moving."”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin (1879–1967) American biologist (1879-1967)

"Evolution and Theological Belief" (1911)

Related topics