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The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.

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
Free
Overcome
Real
Ego
Men
Bounds
Overcoming
Principle
Egocentricity
Whose
Structured
Principles
Bound
Existence
Opposition

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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.
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Our vitality, and the vitality of each nation, rests on the sincerity and depth of the faith in the ideas which it announces, or pronounces.
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I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is, they would say, if they are honest, that it is a big department store, with new things every week - all the money to buy them, and maybe a little more than the neighbours.
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In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
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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.
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Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Love is not a spontaneous feeling, a thing that you fall into, but is something that requires thought, knowledge, care, giving, and respect. And it is something that is rare and difficult to find in capitalism, which commodifies human activity.
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Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
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Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.
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The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology.
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The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.
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I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing.
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To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
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I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion.
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I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism.
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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.
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According to me [Sigmund ] Freud did not notice that the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,resembling in that, poetry or other art forms.
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For [Karl] Marx what counts is man. He is the root of everythingwhile for capitalism, the aim are things, profit, and man is only a means to gain them. As an authentically religious individual, Marx could not be other than against religion.
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There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
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I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.
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