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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.

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
People
Managed
Societies
Mass
Development
Society
Managing
Common
Russians
Bigs
Persuasion
Force
Bureaucracy

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In our enthusiasm to dominate nature and to produce more material good - goods - we have transformed means into ends.
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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 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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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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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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To be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that - there is always a fear that love could disappear.
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It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
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I would say, compared with the 19th century, compared with most previous history, this is as good or better a society than any which man has ever made. But that doesn't mean it is such a good one.
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Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
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We are all equal in the sense that no man must mean - must be - the means for the purposes of another man but each individual is an end in itself.
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Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
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Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.
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This Marxian sentence, repeated to the point of boredom, is misinterpreted. In reality [Karl] Marx was a religious man.
Erich Fromm
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The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
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The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
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In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.
Erich Fromm
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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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It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.
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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.
Erich Fromm