A Quote by Erich Fromm

Equality today means ‘sameness’, rather than ‘oneness’.

Erich Fromm

Quote Topics

Equality Means Oneness Rather Sameness Than Today

Quote Author

Erich Fromm
American - Psychologist
March 23, 1900 - March 18, 1980

There's a big difference between oneness and sameness. Oneness implies that we're all connected and that we all come from the same source. Sameness implies that we all have to do things and exactly think the same way as everybody else does.

Wayne Dyer

That which is to be most desired in America is oneness and not sameness. Sameness is the worst thing that could happen to the people of this country. To make all people the same would lower their quality, but oneness would raise it.

Stephen Samuel Wise

People have foolishly mistaken equality for sameness. Equality of the genders means that both have equal value and worth, and one is not better than the other. But it doesn't mean we're all exactly the same. And many of us who still believe in gender separation say, 'Vive la difference!

Mike Huckabee

Unity does not mean sameness. It means oneness of purpose.

Priscilla Shirer

Equality is of two kinds, numerical and proportional; by the first I mean sameness of equality in number or size; by the second, equality of ratios.

Aristotle

Wherever there is evil and wherever there is ignorance and want of knowledge, I have found out by experience that all evil comes, as our scriptures say, relying upon differences, and that all good comes from faith in equality, in the underlying sameness and oneness of things. This is the great Vedantic ideal.

Swami Vivekananda

The opposite of heterosexual desire is the eroticising of sameness, a sameness of power, equality and mutuality. It is homosexual desire.

Sheila Jeffreys

Today, we talk a lot about equality, but I think what most people mean by it is sameness - that everybody is the same - and they are afraid if they are not the same, they are not equal.

Erich Fromm

Women of the world today dress alike. They are like so many loaves of bread. To be beautiful one must be unhurried. Personality is needed. There is too much sameness. The world seems only to have a desire for more of this sameness. To be different is to be alone.

Luisa Casati

Equality of economic opportunity, in the context of private property, means equality of opportunity for the millions of capital-less households of today to buy, pay for, and employ in their lives the non-human factor of production, capital.

Louis O. Kelso

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

Zadie Smith

A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's less well off to become tomorrow's rich, and in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a richer and fuller life.

Milton Friedman

I was brought up with the sense that I was absolutely no different from my brothers. I went to college thinking I was absolutely no different from the men in college. But that's not true. I'm fundamentally different. The problem was not being able to understand difference and equality at the same time. It's something that we can't seem to comprehend. You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. It's a mistake.

Zadie Smith

The woman's bill of rights is, unhappily, long overdue. It should have run along with the rights of man in the eighteenth century. Its drag as to time of official proclamation is a drag as to social vision. And even if equal rights were now written into the law of our land, it would be so inadequate today as a means to food, clothing and shelter for woman at large that what they would still be enjoying would be equality in disaster rather than in realistic privilege.

Mary Ritter Beard

It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.