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Love
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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