Erich Fromm Quotes

221 Sourced Quotes

Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated... what is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from nature.

Erich Fromm
Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.

Erich Fromm
Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.

Erich Fromm
Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict; joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are only one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.

Erich Fromm
When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of man fell with it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory.

Erich Fromm
Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.

Erich Fromm
But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man.

Erich Fromm
It seems that great minds a hundred years ago saw what would happen today or tomorrow, while we to whom it is happening blind ourselves in order not to be disturbed in our daily routine.

Erich Fromm
The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.

Erich Fromm
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.

Erich Fromm
The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

Erich Fromm