Quotes from Erich Fromm

This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that it is felt to be "natural" and self-evident, while on the other hand the statement that X is A and not A seems to be nonsensical. (Of course, the statement refers to the subject X at a given time, not to X now and X later, or one aspect of X as against another aspect.)

THE GREAT PROMISE OF UNLIMITED PROGRESS—the promise of domination of nature, of material abundance, of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and of unimpeded personal freedom—has sustained the hopes and faith of the generations since the beginning of the industrial age.

A society whose members are helpless need idols.

Gravity is the root of lightness; stillness the ruler of movement." (Mueller, op. cit., p. 69.)

To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.

Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.

The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside of his range of emotional experience.

Man's nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.

Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.

In this very fact that the messiah is a symbol of a new historical period, and not a savior, lies one decisive difference between the Jewish concept and the one developed by the Christian Church.

Die Haltung dem Fremden gegenüber ist von der Haltung sich selbst gegenüber nicht zu trennen. Solange ich einen Mitmenschen als grundsätzlich verschieden von mir erfahre, solange er für mich ein Fremder ist, bleibe ich auch mir selber ein Fremder.

The abolition of external domination seemed to be not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition to attain the cherished goal: freedom of the individual

El maestro aprende de sus alumnos, el auditorio estimula al actor, el paciente cura a su psicoanalista -siempre y cuando no se tratan como objeto sino que están relacionados entre sí en forma productiva-.

The having mode of existence, the attitude centered on property and profit, necessarily produces the desire—indeed the need—for power.

The person and the name become equivalent; the name demonstrates that the person is a lasting, indestructible substance—and not a process.

The socioeconomic structure of a society molds the social character of its members so that they wish to do what they have to do. Simultaneously, the social character influences the socioeconomic structure of society, acting either as cement to give further stability to the social structure or, under special circumstances, as dynamite that tends to break up the social structure.

The incidence of alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive sexualism, and suicide in contemporary Western society are symptoms of this relative failure of herd conformity.

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

while there are many good points in our society, many things if one wants, to be proud of, that it is at least very questionable whether the way of life in which we live right now is more conducive to mental health or to mental illness.

In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

the concept of the halakhah31 that man must act not only according to general principles of justice, truth, and love, but that every act of life be "sanctified," becoming imbued with a religious spirit. "Right action" refers to everything: to the prayer in the morning, to the benediction over food, to the sight of the ocean and of the first flower of the season, to helping the poor, to visiting the sick, to not making a man ashamed in the presence of others.

By being I refer to the mode of existence in which one neither has anything nor craves to have something, but is joyous, employs one's faculties productively, is oned to the world.

It is the laziness of mind to believe that what hasn't been , cannot be and will not be.

we—the proud people who started out to dominate nature—have become slaves of the very economic machine which we created in the process. We dominated nature, but our machine dominates us. We are perhaps more dominated by the artifacts we have created with our machines, than in many cultures people are dominated by nature which they have not learned to master.