Erich Fromm Quotes

I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism.

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one's life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.

Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the same time the beginning of his freedom and the development of his reason.

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.

It doesn't matter whether one uses God or doesn't. What matters is which experience a person has.

Men are born equal but they are also born different.

There is a creative pleasure, which, for instance, the artisan in the Middle Ages, or in a country like Mexico, still today has - namely the pleasure of creating something. You find quite a few skilled workers who still have that pleasure: maybe in a steel mill; maybe a worker who works with a complicated machine - he has a sense that he is creating something.

Freedom does not mean license.

What you might call the "symbol pushers" - that is to say, all of the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better or nicer word - manipulate men and signs and words. All those today have not only to sell their service, but in the bargain, they have to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.

The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love.

There is no word in our language which has been so much misused and prostituted as the word love. It has been preached by those who were ready to condone every cruelty if it served their purpose; it has been used as a disguise under which to force people into sacrificing their own happiness, into submitting their whole self to those who profited from this surrender. [...] It has been made so empty that for many people love may mean no more than that two people have lived together for twenty years just without fighting more often than once a week.

Happiness is a very proud word of our whole cultural heritage.

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.

It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.

Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.

Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.

I need you because I love you.

When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of man fell with it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory.

What is for me socialism is exactly the opposite of a bureaucratically-managed culture.

I am a socialist. However, I have to add that what I understand by socialism is exactly the opposite of what many people, or most people, today mean by socialism.

The individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer.

Women are equal because they are not different any more.

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

I think American man unconsciously hates his work very often, because he feels trapped by it... imprisoned by it... because he feels that he is spending most of his energy for something which has no meaning in itself.

The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

What we have in common is a mass men, a mass bureaucracy, and a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly, but with the illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions.

Authority is not a quality one person 'has,' in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.

Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.

Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others.

Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy.

To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.

In the dream, sheltered from the noise, the subject expressed a judgment much more on the mark than that manifested in wakefulness.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

The only way of full knowledge lies in the act of love; this act transcends thought, it transcends words. It is the daring plunge into the experience of union. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling-it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.

Actually, if you take the average American, and studies have shown that, he is really concerned only with private affairs; that is to say, with his health, his money and family affairs.

I have a tremendous faith in the possibilities of man, which have shown in his past, and I believe if we avoid war, we shall be able to revive our real vision of life, but that we must see it, and therefore, that we must be critical to where we are.

I would say our social relationships are relatively shallow. We are actually afraid to be intimate, with people - many people even with their wives and husbands.