Quotes from Erich Fromm

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.

Happiness is a man's greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside.

Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life.

Man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.

Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission?

Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Women are equal because they are not different any more.

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

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

The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness.

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.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

I see socialism in the direction, of management, of enterprise, by all who work in the enterprise.

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

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.