---
title: '<cite class="book">No Regrets: Dr. Ben Reitman and the Women Who Loved Him</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-09-21T15:21:34+00:00
url: /quotes/no-regrets-dr-ben-reitman-and-the-women-who-loved-him/

---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
  <p>
    My religious life may be a mystery to others but to me it is perfectly clear. They are mystified because to them religion is piety, morality and inhibition. To me religion is love and service.
  </p><footer>Ben Reitman, 
  
  <cite class="book">Follow the Monkey</cite>, p 49</footer>
</blockquote>

> If you drink, you&#8217;ll die, and if you don&#8217;t drink, you&#8217;ll die. Better drink and die.<footer>Russian peasant saying, quoted by Emma Goldman (
> 
> <cite class="book">Living My Life</cite>, p 527</footer> 
> &#8230;I have learned through tears and blood that the intrinsic human value is not successful meetings, or the adulation of the public, or much publicity. The only enduring and abiding value is the capacity to stand out against friend and foe, to be inseparably allied with the future.<footer>Emma Goldman</footer> 

> There are several valid reasons for discharging me but no one mentioned any of them.<footer>Ben Reitman</footer> 

> Jail, death, infamy, loneliness and even ridicule are preferable to inertia and acquiescence.<footer>Ben Reitman</footer> 

> As much as I believe my father loved my sisters and me and admired my mother, as much as I fantasized for years that he would have married my mother had he been able to, the truth is that he wanted it all. Each woman gave him something the other could not. As long as he was married to Rose, neither my mother not Eileen could claim him. He wanted to keep things just the way they were.<footer>Mecca Reitman Carpenter</footer>