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The average American has separated his private life from his existence as a member of his society, and leaves that to the specialists in the government to take care of.

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
Care
Member
Government
Leaves
Take
Average
Life
Private
Members
Existence
Society
Specialists
American
Separated

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Politics and religious leaders [are hindered] by their egotism.
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It is essential... that discipline should not be practised like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one's own will that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behaviour which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practising it.
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The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.
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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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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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If you take a salesman, who sells a useless commodity, he feels like a fraud.
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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.
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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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Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.
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Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.
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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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Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
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To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.
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Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.
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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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That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
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It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
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[Carl Gustav] Jung was not right when he said that the unconscious message is always written clearly and so there is no need to seek to discover the distortions, because one must recognize that many dreams are more or less distortions.
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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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Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience we forget what we knew in our dream.
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