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Erich Fromm

Erich Pinchas Fromm (March 23, 1900 - March 18, 1980) was an internationally renowned German-American Jewish social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory

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A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living...No sensible answer can be given to the question...because the question does not make any sense.

– Erich Fromm

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Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled to concentrate to accept conflict and tension to be born everyday to feel a sense of self.

– Erich Fromm

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Dreams - A microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.

– Erich Fromm

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Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

– Erich Fromm

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If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

– Erich Fromm

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If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

– Erich Fromm

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If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.

– Erich Fromm

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If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it.

– Erich Fromm

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In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

– Erich Fromm

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Infantile love follows the principle: “I love because I am loved.” Mature love follows the principle: “I am loved because I love.” Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”

– Erich Fromm

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Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.

– Erich Fromm

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Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

– Erich Fromm

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Man may be defined as the animal that can say I, that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.

– Erich Fromm

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Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

– Erich Fromm

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Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

– Erich Fromm

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Man's main task is to give birth to himself.

– Erich Fromm

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Modern man thinks he loses something time when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.

– Erich Fromm

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Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by patriotism I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare --never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

– Erich Fromm

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Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

– Erich Fromm

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One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

– Erich Fromm

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Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

– Erich Fromm

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Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

– Erich Fromm

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Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.

– Erich Fromm

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That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.

– Erich Fromm

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The aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thng, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life-freedom.

– Erich Fromm

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The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become Golems, they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.

– Erich Fromm

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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.

– Erich Fromm

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The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while ones own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standardevery action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.

– Erich Fromm

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The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

– Erich Fromm

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The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.

– Erich Fromm

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The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

– Erich Fromm

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

– Erich Fromm

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The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

– Erich Fromm

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There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

– Erich Fromm

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There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

– Erich Fromm

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There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers.

– Erich Fromm

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There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by the unfolding of his powers.

– Erich Fromm

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To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

– Erich Fromm

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Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists.... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be incompleteness in absence.

– Erich Fromm

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We all dream we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.

– Erich Fromm

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We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

– Erich Fromm

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Who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies

– Erich Fromm

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