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The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while ones own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standardevery action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.
-Erich Fromm
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Alienation
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By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts -- but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.
-Erich Fromm
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Attachment
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The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.
-Erich Fromm
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Charity
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Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
-Erich Fromm
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Consumerism
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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
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Control
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Authority is not a quality one person has, in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
-Erich Fromm
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Creativity
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Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
-Erich Fromm
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Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
-Erich Fromm
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Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.
-Erich Fromm
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Death
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To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
-Erich Fromm
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Destruction
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That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.
-Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
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Discovery
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As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found - in himself.
-Erich Fromm
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Doubt
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The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
-Erich Fromm
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Dreams
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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 when we are awake.
-Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language
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Equality
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Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
-Erich Fromm
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Faith
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Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
-Erich Fromm
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Future, The
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The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become Golems, they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.
-Erich Fromm
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Greed
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Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
-Erich Fromm
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Identity
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Man may be defined as the animal that can say I, that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.
-Erich Fromm
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Integrity
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Integrity simple means not violating one's own identity.
-Erich Fromm
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Intelligence
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Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. 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
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Life
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Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
-Erich Fromm
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Love
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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
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Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
-Erich Fromm
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In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
-Erich Fromm
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Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
-Erich Fromm
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Mankind, Man
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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, Man For Himself (New York: Rinehart and Company), 1947
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Mother
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Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
-Erich Fromm
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Patriotism
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Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by patriotism I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare --never with its power over other nations. 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
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Personality
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Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
-Erich Fromm, Man for Himself
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Power
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The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind -- not the fiend or the sadist.
-Erich Fromm
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Present, the
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In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
-Erich Fromm
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Property
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If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
-Erich Fromm
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Purpose
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There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers.
-Erich Fromm
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Reason
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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
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Recognition
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What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
-Erich Fromm
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Revolution
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The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
-Erich Fromm
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Science
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The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. 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
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Security
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The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
-Erich Fromm
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Society
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Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.
-Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, 1970
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Time
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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.
-Erich Fromm
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Truth
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Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.
-Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be?, 1979
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Weakness
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Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
-Erich Fromm
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Books by and about Erich Fromm
