Top 430 Quotes & Sayings by Erich Fromm - Page 7

The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.

The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste. But differences in character are ethically of the most fundamental importance.

I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also as a humanist.

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.

Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?

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.

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.

Man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an "individual," has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.

In the dream, sheltered from the noise, the subject expressed a judgment much more on the mark than that manifested in wakefulness.

The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.

Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy.

Love is not easy. All great religions postulate love as one of the greatest accomplishments. If it were that easy, or as easy as most people think, certainly, the great religious leaders would have been rather naive.

The average American never loses his sleep about affairs which relate to his society and to our whole country.

We have, in the same way, relegated our own responsibility in what happens to our country to the specialists, who are supposed to take care of it, and the individual citizen does not feel that he can judge, and even that he should judge, and take any responsibility. I think there are quite a number of recent developments which show that.

Many students of dreams, from Plato to [Sigmund] Freud, hold that the sleeping person,deprived of contact with the outside world, regresses temporarily to an irrational primitive mental state.

If our supreme value is the development of the Western tradition - of a man for whom the highest thing in life is man, for whom love for man, respect for man, and the dignity of man, are supreme values - then we cannot ask the question that says, "if it is better for our survival, might we drop these values?"

I have learnt to appreciate the clarity of English language.

In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.

Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.

[Sigmund ] Freud did not under-stand that the dream is a highly creative act, written in the universal language of symbolism, and only secondarily does censorship distort those parts that the subject refuses to accept even in sleep.

For [Karl] Marx it is socialist society which realizes "concretely" the religious principles of equality, brotherly love, and freedom.

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.

What is for me socialism is exactly the opposite of a bureaucratically-managed culture.

If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.

If the Russians claim they are Socialist, this is just, I would say, a lie. They have no socialism at all. They have what I would call a state capitalism.

The ownership of industry by the state - that is not socialism.

That is not quite enough to make one happy, if one spends eight hours a day in something which in itself has no meaning and interest, except that one gains money from it.

The activity at this very moment must be the only thing that matters, to which one is fully given. If one is concentrated, it matters little what one is doing. The important, as well as the unimportant things, assume a new dimension of reality, because they have one's full attention.

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.

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.

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.

Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.

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.

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, ie , concernedly and "responsibly." one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of man.

From my personal experience I can conclude that many dreams are clearly written but there are some in which one meets distortions to decipher. And it is really in knowing when one must prefer the one or the other approach, or a combination of the two, that remains one of the important elements of the art of dream interpretation.

[Sigmund Freud] makes the interpretation of dreams extremely simple: it deals in substance with discovering what unconscious desires, distorted but recognizable, are hid-den in the dream. Instead, for me the dream is a mixture of thoughts and sensations that man has when he is asleep, a mental state relatively protected from the constant noise that society makes.

I understand by socialism a society in which the aim of production is not profit, but the use. In which the individual citizen participates responsibly in his work, and in the whole social organization, and in which he is not a means who is employed by capital.

The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.

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.

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.

Technical Utopias-flying, for example-have been achieved by the new science of nature.The human utopia...a united new humankind living in solidarity and peace, free from economic determination and from war and class struggle-can be achieved, provided we spend the same energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm on the realization of the human Utopia as we have spent on the realization of our technical Utopias.

The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx's concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud's.

The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.

If there is no evidence that sport lowers aggression, at the same time it should be said that there is also no evidence that sport is motivated by aggression.

Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have tr

Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function; in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us.

The fact is that the culture does not have only positive effects on our intellectual and moral functions but also negative effects.

In his condemnation [Karl] Marx referred to institutionalized religion,that has precisely the function of anesthetizing men till they do not notice the in- justice of which they are the perpetrators and the victims.

By equality, one once understood equality in the very same sense in which the Bible speaks of equality: that we are all equal, inasmuch as we are created in the image of God.

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.

If we begin to say, "Well, maybe we can cope better with the Russians if we also transform ourselves into a managed society, if we, as somebody put it the other day, train our soldiers to be like the Turks, who have fought so bravely in Korea, if we are willing to change our whole way of life for the sake of so-called "survival," then I think we do exactly that which threatens our survival.

I think [Karl] Marx, Pope John XXIII or Rosa Luxemburg [had achieved the mode of existence].But it would be useless to look at a list of illustrious names.

I see socialism in the direction, of management, of enterprise, by all who work in the enterprise.

The individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making.

Jewish legend says that the world rests on 36 just men: only thirty six, but their moral strength is immense.

The Russians have succeeded in one thing: they have sold the world the idea that they represent socialism and the ideas of Marx,and we have done the greatest service to their propaganda by agreeing that that's what it is.

[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.

We can express ideas without being afraid of being killed or imprisoned.

Actually, if you take the average American, and studies have shown that, he is really concerned only with private affairs; that is to say, with his health, his money and family affairs.