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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.

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
Mean
Average
Something
Concerned
Loses
Sleep
Society
American
Speak
Talks
Sometimes
Speaks

More quotes by Erich Fromm

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Man absolutely cannot live by himself.
Erich Fromm
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Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
Erich Fromm
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Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.
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We are terribly imaginative, as far as technique in science is concerned. As far as changes in social arrangements are concerned, we lack utterly in imagination.
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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.
Erich Fromm
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To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
Erich Fromm
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Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
Erich Fromm
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People do not see that the main question is not : Am I loved? which is to a large extent the question : Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired? The main question is: Can I love?
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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Greedhas no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm
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The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
Erich Fromm
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Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life
Erich Fromm
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I want to mention that Marx shares something, if you don't mind the comparison, with the Old Testament: many people talk about him, but nobody has read him.
Erich Fromm
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In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.
Erich Fromm
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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.
Erich Fromm