A Quote by Erich Fromm

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

Erich Fromm

Quote Topics

Destructive Even Human Man Most Sadistic Saint

Quote Author

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

He was a patient man, a kind man, a man who cared about animals and human beings, all qualities not to be devalued, but James Herriot was not a saint. I tried so hard to play against some of the scripts that implied that he was a saint, but I don't think I was always altogether successful.

Christopher Timothy

I believe that the destructive nature of society that now threatens the existence of the entire human world has much to do with human intelligence. The way to overcome all human suffering-that also is through human intelligence.

Dalai Lama

Wherefrom are human values to be derived and how are they to be developed? Human values are born along with human birth. They exist in union. Unfortunately, man today separates himself from human values and yet wants to live as a human being. To recover human values, man has to take the spiritual path.

Sathya Sai Baba

Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong and demonstrably more destructive for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.

L. Neil Smith

A civilization built on dualism and war within and between persons, one that puts its most creative minds and its best engineers to sadistic work building more and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at all. It needs a radical transformation from the heart outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just as in the last century it outlawed slavery. The human race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows it yet.

Matthew Fox

The object of all religious activity is to mingle the human and the non-human, and the lower gods represent that which is cast back to the human from the non-human - human gods merely, practice-gods who embody the errors which man makes in first conceiving the non-human.

Laura Riding

Fear is the most subtle and destructive of all human diseases.

Smiley Blanton

Today it is not alive. What, then, is this experience of humanism? With the above survey I have tried to show you that the experience of humanism is that — as Terence expressed it — “Nothing human is alien to me”; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and I am the saint. I am the child and I am the adult. I am the man who lived a hundred thousand years ago and I am the man who, provided we don't destroy the human race, will live hundred thousand years from now.

Erich Fromm

Human life is an extension of the principles of nature, and human civilization is a venture extrapolated out of human natures: man and his natural potential are the root of the entire human domain. The great task of all philosophizing is to become competent to interpret and steer the potential developmental forces in human natures and in the human condition, both of which are prodigiously fatalistic.

Kenny Smith

Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man's traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that 'other' who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals.

Mario Vargas Llosa

What is the importance of human lives? Is it their continuing alive for so many years like animals in a menagerie? The value of a man cannot be judged by the number of diseases from which he escapes. The value of a man is in his human qualities: in his character, in his conscience, in the nobility and magnanimity, of his soul. Torturing animals to prolong human life has separated science from the most important thing that life has produced - the human conscience.

John Cowper Powys

Racism is a destructive and artificially-manufactured element in the collective human psyche designed to fragment the natural desire of human beings to know and love one another

Jane Urquhart

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

Storm Jameson

I do like to make people cringe. That discomfort, tension, embarrassment, pain - all of those things interest me, and not through some sort of masochistic or sadistic impulse. It illuminates what being a human being is. It taps into what it is to be human more incisively than stuff that's just very pedestrian.

Steve Coogan

But it has, in addition, an even more precious quality - a consciousness of the human intelligence, the human spirit and that man is a social creature.