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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.

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
Supposed
Wants
Modern
Actually
Lives
Men
Miscellaneous
Illusion

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Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible.
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The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.
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We talk a great deal about Russia today, and I'm afraid that in twenty years, we and Russia will be more similar than different.
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People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or to be loved by - is difficult.
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Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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A vast sector of modern advertising... does not appeal to reason but to emotion like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.
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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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Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.
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The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.
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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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When people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, they will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright.
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Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.
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