Erich Fromm - The Sane Society (1955)

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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
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. In the nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the twentieth century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

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

Erich Fromm
Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them.

Erich Fromm
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.

Erich Fromm
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 mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.

Erich Fromm
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. "Patriotism" is its cult.

Erich Fromm
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.

Erich Fromm
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
In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue.

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, without panic and undue fear.

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
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

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

Erich Fromm
We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

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
It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.

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