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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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Erich Fromm
Age: 79 †
Born: 1900
Born: March 23
Died: 1980
Died: March 18
Philosopher
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Wonder
Surprised
Education
Sign
Process
Surprise
Anything
Capacity
Everything
Ignorance
Feel
Lose
Puzzled
Feels
Ought
Wondering
People
Loses
Hence

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Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality - or as one says sometimes, our personality package - for something.
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Man absolutely cannot live by himself.
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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.
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Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
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In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.
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Actually, if you take the average American, and studies have shown that, he is really concerned only with private affairs that is to say, with his health, his money and family affairs.
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Mother's love always peace as it not to be acquired nor deserved.
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The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.
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In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.
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I would say our social relationships are relatively shallow. We are actually afraid to be intimate, with people - many people even with their wives and husbands.
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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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A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.
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FORTITUDE IS THE CAPACITY TO SAY NO WHEN THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR 'YES'
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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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We have a religious renaissance today in America, as many people say. I would say this religious renaissance, ninety percent of it is the greatest danger true religious experience has ever been confronted with.
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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.
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Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.
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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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The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense of life.
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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