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

Erich Fromm

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Erich Fromm
Age: 79 †
Born: 1900
Born: March 23
Died: 1980
Died: March 18
Philosopher
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Ordinary
Danger
Mankind
Fear
Sadist
Power
Fiend
Men
Chief
Chiefs
Extraordinary

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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Once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised. They feel they ought to know everything, and hence that it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised or puzzled by anything.
Erich Fromm
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If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.
Erich Fromm
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I think American man unconsciously hates his work very often, because he feels trapped by it... imprisoned by it... because he feels that he is spending most of his energy for something which has no meaning in itself.
Erich Fromm
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In our enthusiasm to dominate nature and to produce more material good - goods - we have transformed means into ends.
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I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also as a humanist.
Erich Fromm
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Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.
Erich Fromm
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I think we got off the track, as many societies do, who follow successfully one aim, and yet are not capable of seeing at what point the pursuit of this aim prevents them from following a more total aim. That is to say, they get into a blind alley.
Erich Fromm
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Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them.
Erich Fromm
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To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.
Erich Fromm
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Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
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When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.
Erich Fromm
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Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.
Erich Fromm
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I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence he is aware of others as others man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought.
Erich Fromm
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Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.
Erich Fromm
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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 narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a loving mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.
Erich Fromm
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Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.
Erich Fromm
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The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.
Erich Fromm
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In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
Erich Fromm
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Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.
Erich Fromm