Quotes from Erich Fromm

The absolutely alienated individual worships at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is known.

Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless he doubts that he is acceptable, and why should a young, educated and successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves because they are not themselves.

The Jewish and particularly the Christian traditions have stressed the element of sin but have ignored the fact that it is the emancipation from the security of Paradise which is the basis for man's truly human development.

In the sphere of material things giving means being rich. Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.

La peggiore di tutte le passioni umane, l'impulso a servirsi di un proprio simile per fini egoistici, in nome della propria superiorità, ben poco si differenzia da una forma raffinata di cannibalismo.

An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.

Today I, tomorrow you. But this need of help does not mean that the one is helpless, the other powerful. Helplesness is a transitory condition; the ability to stand and walk on one's own feet is the permanent and common one

Meister Eckhart on this topic: "If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is a great and righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally."[14]

Any society, in order to survive, must mold the character of its members in such a way that they want to do what they have to do; their social function must become internalized and transformed into something they feel driven to do, rather than something they are obliged to do.

The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man.

God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to "labor" for something and "to make something grow

For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice.

It is desirable to avoid trivial and evil company altogether—unless one can assert oneself fully, and thus make the other doubt his own position.

As a child, every human being passes through a state of powerlessness, and truth is one of the strongest weapons of those who have no power.

Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.

Reality imposes its law on man, laws that he can only escape in dreams or in states of trance—or in insanity.

One discovers answers to problems only when one feels that they are burning and that it is a a matter of life and death to solve them. Is nothing is of burning interest, one's reason and one's critical faculty operate on a low level of activity; it appears then that one lacks the faculty to observe.

Lack of concentration makes one tired, while concentration wakes one up.

Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality.

To know and yet [think] we do not know is the highest [attainment]; not to know [and yet think] we do know is a disease.

Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called "equality.

Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human man.

All this kind of relationship amounts to is the well?oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives, who never arrive at a "central relationship," but who treat each other with courtesy and who attempt to make each other feel better.