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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.

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
Thinking
Becomes
Acting
True
Also
Firsts
First
Empty
Kind
Possibility
Think
Stupid

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If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals...We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities.
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In fact, there are very important writings of Marx which are not even translated into English.
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To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness
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Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
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Man always dies before he is fully born.
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Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them.
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FORTITUDE IS THE CAPACITY TO SAY NO WHEN THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR 'YES'
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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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If you do not smile, you are judged lacking in a 'pleasing personality' - and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman, or a physician.
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The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
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To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.
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Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way but only almost.
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The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself indeed, we should be fully born when we die.
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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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Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.
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What is common to our societies is the development into a managed mass society, with big bureaucracy, managing people. The Russians do it by force. We do it by persuasion.
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When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion.
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The experience of separateness arouses anxiety it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.
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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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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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