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.
--Erich Fromm
As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
--Erich Fromm
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.
--Erich Fromm
Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion.
--Erich Fromm
Freedom, although it has brought (modern man) independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.
--Erich Fromm
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
--Erich Fromm
I believe that none can 'save' his fellow man by making a choice for him. To help him, he can indicate the possible alternatives, with sincerity and love, without being sentimental and without illusion.
--Erich Fromm
I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between 'life' and 'death;' between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.
--Erich Fromm
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
--Erich Fromm
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'
--Erich Fromm
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
--Erich Fromm
Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.
--Erich Fromm
Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.
--Erich Fromm
Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.
--Erich Fromm
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.
--Erich Fromm
Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
--Erich Fromm
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
--Erich Fromm
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
--Erich Fromm
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
--Erich Fromm
Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.
--Erich Fromm
People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.
--Erich Fromm
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
--Erich Fromm
Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.
--Erich Fromm
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
--Erich Fromm
The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.
--Erich Fromm
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
--Erich Fromm
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
--Erich Fromm
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
--Erich Fromm
To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.
--Erich Fromm
Women are equal because they are not different anymore.
--Erich Fromm
Found 30 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).