Quotes from Erich Fromm

Union by conformity is not intense and violent; it is calm, dictated by routine, and for this very reason often is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness.

La meta del socialismo era la individualidad y no la uniformidad; la liberación de las ataduras económicas, no la realización de los objetivos materiales como primordial preocupación de la vida. Su principio era que cada ser humano es un fin en sí mismo, y jamás debe de ser el medio de otro hombre.

Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies - either against others or against oneself - are nourished.

Without information, deliberation, and the power to make one's decision effective, democratically expressed opinion is hardly more than the applause at a sports event.

The necessity to find ever-new solutions for the contradictions in his existence, to find ever-higher forms of unity with nature, his fellowmen and himself, is the source of all psychic forces which motivate man, of all his passions, affects and anxieties.

The problem of knowing man is parallel to the religious problem of knowing God. In conventional Western theology the attempt is made to know God by thought, to make statements about God. It is assumed that I can know God in my thought. In mysticism, which is the consequent outcome of monotheism, the attempt is given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the experience of union with God in which there is no more room—and no need—for knowledge about God.

Active and responsible participation further requires that humanistic management replace bureaucratic management.

While psychiatry is concerned with the question of why some people become insane, the real question is why most people do not become insane.

Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds.

Simultaneous love for authority and the hatred against those who are powerless are typical of the authoritarian character

Ma in molti individui per i quali, la solitudine non può essere superata in nessun modo, la ricerca dell'orgasmo sessuale assume una funzione che li rende non molto diversi da alcolizzati e dai tossicomani. Diventa un tentativo disperato di sfuggire all'ansia suscitata dal separazione e il suo risultato è un sempre crescente senso d'isolamento, poiché l'atto sessuale senza amore, non riempie mai il baratro che divide due creature umane, se non in modo assolutamente momentaneo.

A person even if he is subjectively sincere, may frequently be driven unconsciously by a motive that is different from the one he believes himself to be driven by

In the experience of love lies the only answer to being human, lies sanity.

The understanding of the operation of unconscious elements has taught us to be sceptical towards words and not to take them at face value.

Just as man transforms the world around him, so he transforms himself in the process of history. He is his own creation, as it were. But just as he can only transform and modify the natural materials around him according to their nature, so he can only transform and modify himself according to his own nature. What man does in the process of history is to develop this potential, and to transform it according to its own possibilities.

Though there is no fixed human nature, we cannot regard human nature as being infinitely malleable and able to adapt itself to any kind of conditions without developing a psychological dynamism of its own

Sadista usiluje o moc nad ?lovÄ›kem právÄ› proto, že nemá moc skute?nÄ› prožívat sv?j život, být.

o amor não é um sentimento em que qualquer um se possa comprazer, sem levar em conta o nível de maturidade que alcançou.

This need for self-preservation is that part of human nature which needs satisfaction under all circumstances and therefore forms the primary motive of human behaviour.

Sadista se chce stát pánem života, a proto je nutné, aby jeho ob?? žila. To ho právÄ› odliÅ¡uje od destruktivního ?lovÄ›ka. Ten chce druhého ?lovÄ›ka odstranit, usmrtit, chce zni?it samotný život, chce život ovládat a pÃ…â"¢iÅ¡krcovat.

Whether we deal with primitive religions, with theistic or non-theistic religions, they are all attempts to give an answer to man's existential problem.

life is never certain, never predictable, never controllable; in order to make life controllable it must be transformed into death; death, indeed, is the only certainty in life.

In children we often see this path to knowledge quite overtly. The child takes something apart, breaks it up in order to know it; or it takes an animal apart; cruelly tears off the wings of a butterfly in order to know it, to force its secret. The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.

Economists look with some apprehension to the time when we stop producing armaments, and the idea that the state should produce houses and other useful and needed things instead of weapons, easily provokes accusations of endangering freedom and individual initiative.