Erich Fromm Quotes

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.

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

Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.

In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.

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 would say that love today is a relatively rare phenomenon, that we have a great deal of sentimentality; we have a great deal of illusion about love, namely as a... as something one falls in.

If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself, too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.

I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.

The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person and him of great joy is the difference between get and give.

All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.

In the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.

If you take a salesman, who sells a useless commodity, he feels like a fraud.

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

Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody - and I "know" nothing.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

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.

Today, we talk a lot about equality, but I think what most people mean by it is sameness - that everybody is the same - and they are afraid if they are not the same, they are not equal.

Our vitality, and the vitality of each nation, rests on the sincerity and depth of the faith in the ideas which it announces, or pronounces.

The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile.

Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way; but only "almost.

The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

If there is no evidence that sport lowers aggression, at the same time it should be said that there is also no evidence that sport is motivated by aggression.

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

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.

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

Man absolutely cannot live by himself.

The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.

We substitute, or we rather hide, this fear of real intimacy by a superficial kind of friendliness, which is quite nice, but nevertheless, very shallow.

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.

Loving becomes, and the ability to love, becomes one of the most important things in life.

There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices.

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.

Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.

To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge.

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.

To be concentrated means to live fully in the present.

There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are few for whom it is the other way around.

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.

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

If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.

The only concern which I have today is that we have a policy, a foreign policy, which enables us to avoid a catastrophe; which, if one understands it properly, is indescribable.

I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing.

We must make a decision of values.

Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.

When an individual is awake, almost all he does and says is inspired by the model of behavior that the society imposes,even without his being aware of it.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.

Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves.

We are terribly imaginative, as far as technique in science is concerned. As far as changes in social arrangements are concerned, we lack utterly in imagination.

Politics and religious leaders [are hindered] by their egotism.