Quote

I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity.

Erich Fromm

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Erich Fromm
Age: 79 †
Born: 1900
Born: March 23
Died: 1980
Died: March 18
Philosopher
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Individual
Intimate
Cannot
Contact
Human
Potential
Humans
Development
Believe
Humanity
Furthers
Way
Path
Impedes
Seeing
Transcending
Society
Enter

More quotes by Erich Fromm

Image
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.
Erich Fromm
Image
Freedom does not mean license.
Erich Fromm
Image
Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us.
Erich Fromm
Image
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
Image
We've wanted to produce more in the 19th century and the 20th century in order to give man the possibility for more dignified human life but actually what has happened is that production and consumption have become means - have ceased to be means and have become ends, and we are production crazy and consumption crazy.
Erich Fromm
Image
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.
Erich Fromm
Image
We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
Erich Fromm
Image
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.
Erich Fromm
Image
It seems that great minds a hundred years ago saw what would happen today or tomorrow, while we to whom it is happening blind ourselves in order not to be disturbed in our daily routine.
Erich Fromm
Image
I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also as a humanist.
Erich Fromm
Image
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
Erich Fromm
Image
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
Image
If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.
Erich Fromm
Image
Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way but only almost.
Erich Fromm
Image
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
Image
You have to stop in order to change direction.
Erich Fromm
Image
I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.
Erich Fromm
Image
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
Erich Fromm
Image
Ger-mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear.
Erich Fromm
Image
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