Erich Fromm

“There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.”

“If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories...”

“Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are reduced from what man dreads: isolation”

“Love is not the result of adequate sexual satisfaction, but sexual happiness—even the knowledge of the so-called sexual technique—is the result of love. If aside from everyday observation th...”

“Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains—except kill it.”

“Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.”

“There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”

“The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.”

“What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”

“As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.”

“If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.”

“Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.”

“The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.”

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

“Man always dies before he is fully born.”

“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”

“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”

“Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell...”

“We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds wh...”