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Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.

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
Pessimism
Optimism
Despair
Faith
Form
Alienated

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There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
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If the Russians claim they are Socialist, this is just, I would say, a lie. They have no socialism at all. They have what I would call a state capitalism.
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The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.
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I need you because I love you.
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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.
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It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.
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In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
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Freedom does not mean license.
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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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Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.
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All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.
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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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We substitute, or we rather hide, this fear of real intimacy by a superficial kind of friendliness, which is quite nice, but nevertheless, very shallow.
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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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There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.
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The only concern which I have today is that we have a policy, a foreign policy, which enables us to avoid a catastrophe which, if one understands it properly, is indescribable.
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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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An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.
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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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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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