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When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.

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
Expressed
Transformed
Sexuality
Impulse
Masochism
Instinct
Sadism
Death
Blended
Harmless
Impulses

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In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
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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.
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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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The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love.
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Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers who want to consume more and more and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated ... what is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from nature.
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Man always dies before he is fully born.
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Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.
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The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology.
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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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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?
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Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.
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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.
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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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We are concerned with things. We are concerned with success. We are concerned with money. We are concerned with instrumentalities.
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Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.
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Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.
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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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Love is an active power in man a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unite him with others love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity.
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Freedom does not mean license.
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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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