Erich Fromm Quotes

[Sigmund ] Freud assumes that every dream represents the satisfaction of adesire and in the last analysis, of a sexual desire that has its roots in infancy.

Fairness means not to use fraud and trickery in the exchange of commodities and services and the exchange of feelings.

The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.

Women are equal because they are not different any more.

I am a socialist. However, I have to add that what I understand by socialism is exactly the opposite of what many people, or most people, today mean by socialism.

I feel worried, deeply worried, only about one thing - the possibility that we fall... that we cannot avoid an atomic war.

People seek a new orientation, a new philosophy, one which is centered on the priorities of life-physically and spiritually-and not on the priorities of death.

Mother's love always peace as it not to be acquired nor deserved.

Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy.

If the Russians claim they are Socialist, this is just, I would say, a lie. They have no socialism at all. They have what I would call a state capitalism.

The ownership of industry by the state - that is not socialism.

What is for me socialism is exactly the opposite of a bureaucratically-managed culture.

The fact is that the culture does not have only positive effects on our intellectual and moral functions but also negative effects.

The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.

Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.

I have learnt to appreciate the clarity of English language.

We can express ideas without being afraid of being killed or imprisoned.

I think [Karl] Marx, Pope John XXIII or Rosa Luxemburg [had achieved the mode of existence].But it would be useless to look at a list of illustrious names.

In our enthusiasm to dominate nature and to produce more material good - goods - we have transformed means into ends.

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

In fact, there are very important writings of Marx which are not even translated into English.

This Marxian sentence, repeated to the point of boredom, is misinterpreted. In reality [Karl] Marx was a "religious" man.

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent — people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.

Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.

For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet falling bound to come and quickly go away.

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

Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine.

the key problem of psychology is that of the specific kind of relatedness of the individual towards the world and not that of the satisfaction or frustration of this or that instinctual need per se

We... have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Yet we have managed to kill off millions of our population in an arrangement which we call "war.

Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.

To be concentrated means to live fully in the present, in the here and now, and not to think of the next thing to be done, while I am doing something right now.

Only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose, love begins to unfold.

What a person considers the minimal necessities depends as much on his character as it depends on his actual possessions.

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

They were more free, but they were more alone.

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

A society whose members are helpless need idols.

The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life.

If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology.

They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity.

The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.

Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.

The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep.

We are what we do.

The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.

The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation, ' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown.

Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labor). Power follows from possession, not from activity.

Equality today means "sameness" rather than "oneness".