Erich Fromm Quotes

If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences,that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, i perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center - instead of that from periphery to periphery - is 'central relatedness'.

The average American is not concerned with his society. He talks about it, but you know if one speaks of being concerned, I mean something about which one loses one's sleep, sometimes.

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.

I have learnt to appreciate the clarity of English language.

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found- in himself.

All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.

I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity.

When people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, they will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright.

There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.

We talk a great deal about Russia today, and I'm afraid that in twenty years, we and Russia will be more similar than different.

In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.

Giving is the highest expression of potency.

If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life

Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.

For [Sigmund ] Freud, the manifest dream, that is that which we remember after waking,is like a code message, that can be interpreted, provided the right key is avail-able, for example the method of free association.

What is common to our societies is the development into a managed mass society, with big bureaucracy, managing people. The Russians do it by force. We do it by persuasion.

To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge to overcome makes us stronger, rather than unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage.

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.

The average American never loses his sleep about affairs which relate to his society and to our whole country.

[Sigmund ] Freud assumes that every dream represents the satisfaction of adesire and in the last analysis, of a sexual desire that has its roots in infancy.

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet 'for sale', who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society.

We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally - that is, for himself - which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.

The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.

I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also as a humanist.

Respect is not fear and awe; it...[is]the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.

I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union.

It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.

The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.

Love is the productive form of relatedness to others and to oneself. It implies responsibility, care, respect. If it isn't productive and respectful, it isn't love, but only fear masquerading as love.

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

Love is hot a higher power which descends upon mn nor a duty which is imposed upon him; it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his.

Freedom is the fundamental condition for any growth.

We try to evade the question of existence with property, prestige, power, possession, production, fun, and, ultimately, by trying to forget that we- that I- exist. No matter how much he thinks of God or goes to church, or how much he believes in religious ideas , if he, the whole man, is deaf to the question of existence, if he does not have an answer to it, he is marking time, and he lives and dies like one of the million things he produces. He thinks of God, instead of experiencing God.

Ger-mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear.

Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either "have" or "have not." In fact, there is no such thing as "freedom" except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life.

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

If our supreme value is the development of the Western tradition - of a man for whom the highest thing in life is man, for whom love for man, respect for man, and the dignity of man, are supreme values - then we cannot ask the question that says, "if it is better for our survival, might we drop these values?"

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

I understand by socialism a society in which the aim of production is not profit, but the use. In which the individual citizen participates responsibly in his work, and in the whole social organization, and in which he is not a means who is employed by capital.

The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.

We have, in the same way, relegated our own responsibility in what happens to our country to the specialists, who are supposed to take care of it, and the individual citizen does not feel that he can judge, and even that he should judge, and take any responsibility. I think there are quite a number of recent developments which show that.

A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.