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Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the same time the beginning of his freedom and the development of his reason.

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
Humans
Begins
Men
Beginning
Time
Development
Liberty
Freedom
History
Reason
Human
Disobedience

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Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
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To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
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It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
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Love is hot a higher power which descends upon mn nor a duty which is imposed upon him it is his own power by which he relates himself to the world and makes it truly his.
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The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.
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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.
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The average American has separated his private life from his existence as a member of his society, and leaves that to the specialists in the government to take care of.
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Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way but only almost.
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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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[Carl Gustav] Jung was not right when he said that the unconscious message is always written clearly and so there is no need to seek to discover the distortions, because one must recognize that many dreams are more or less distortions.
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Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have tr
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When an individual is awake, almost all he does and says is inspired by the model of behavior that the society imposes,even without his being aware of it.
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Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.
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Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer.
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The average American is not concerned with his society. He talks about it, but you know if one speaks of being concerned, I mean something about which one loses one's sleep, sometimes.
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We are terribly imaginative, as far as technique in science is concerned. As far as changes in social arrangements are concerned, we lack utterly in imagination.
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To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness
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[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.
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Love is the only way of knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover us both, I discover man.
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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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