A Quote by Wilhelm Reich

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.
You yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day. You think the goal justifies the means, even the vile means. You are wrong: The goal is in the path on which you arrive at it. Every step of today is your life of tomorrow. No great goal can be reached by vile means. That you have proven in every social revolution. The vileness or inhumanity of the path to the goal makes you vile or inhuman, and the goal unattainable.
Your policy should be a mixture between your interests and how you reach your ends, but based on values. It cannot be only the end justifies the means, because for the criminals, ends justify the means, for thieves, for every illegal and immoral action, the end justifies the means.
We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum
Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum.
And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.
We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.
In the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and, ultimately, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.
I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion. The truth of the mater is that hierarchy and violence can't be remedied by more hierarchy and violence. The end doesn't justify the means, the means we choose decide the end we get. The means are the end.
The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.
Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If the means achieves the end then the means is good... the new Ministry has no other aim than to unite the nation behind the ideal of the national revolution.
The means ought to be proportioned to the end; the persons from whose agency the attainment of any end is expected ought to possess the means by which it is to be attained.
There is an international disease which feeds on the notion that if you have a cause to defend, you can use any means to further your cause, since the end justifies the means. As an international community, we must oppose this notion, whether it be in Canada, in the United States, or anywhere else. No cause justifies violence as long as the system provides for change by peaceful means.
The end never justifies the means because there is no end; there are only means.
Too soon we breast the tape and too late we realize the fun lay in the running. We deny that the end justifies the means without ever stopping to consider that for practical purposes the End and the Means are one and the same thing. If there is to be any satisfaction in life it must come in transit, for who can tell when he will be struck down in mid-method?
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