Erich Fromm

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ''Patriotism'' is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by ''patriotism'' I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare --never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
Erich Fromm

By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts -- but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.
Erich Fromm

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists.... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
Erich Fromm

The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced -- by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.
Erich Fromm

Integrity simple means not violating one's own identity.
Erich Fromm

Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains -- except kill it.
Erich Fromm

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.
Erich Fromm

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.
Erich Fromm

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become ''Golems,'' they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.
Erich Fromm

The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge
Erich Fromm

Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.
Erich Fromm

Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
Erich Fromm

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
Erich Fromm

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
Erich Fromm

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Erich Fromm

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
Erich Fromm

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Erich Fromm

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
Erich Fromm

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.
Erich Fromm

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
Erich Fromm

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

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.
Erich Fromm

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
Erich Fromm

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
Erich Fromm

Authority is not a quality one person "has," in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
Erich Fromm

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
Erich Fromm

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
Erich Fromm

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
Erich Fromm

The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Erich Fromm

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
Erich Fromm

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
Erich Fromm

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Erich Fromm

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
Erich Fromm

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
Erich Fromm

We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
Erich Fromm

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
Erich Fromm

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Erich Fromm

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

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
Erich Fromm

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
Erich Fromm

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
Erich Fromm

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
Erich Fromm

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
Erich Fromm

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
Erich Fromm

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
Erich Fromm

Man always dies before he is fully born.
Erich Fromm

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
Erich Fromm