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Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission?

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
Freedom
Besides
Wish
Tries
Desire
Escape
Become
Burden
Also
Bear
Trying
Heavy
Instinctive
Something
Bears
Submission
Men
Perhaps
Innate

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
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Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.
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The Russians have succeeded in one thing: they have sold the world the idea that they represent socialism and the ideas of Marx,and we have done the greatest service to their propaganda by agreeing that that's what it is.
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The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high it is the loss of his self.
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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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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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Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way but only almost.
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If you take a salesman, who sells a useless commodity, he feels like a fraud.
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The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself indeed, we should be fully born when we die.
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I understand by socialism a society in which the aim of production is not profit, but the use. In which the individual citizen participates responsibly in his work, and in the whole social organization, and in which he is not a means who is employed by capital.
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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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If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals...We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities.
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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.
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Respect is not fear and awe it...[is]the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
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As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
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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.
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The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.
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We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and love.
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The state of sleep is a state of freedom in which man is not occupied with the manipulation of the outside world.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm