Erich Fromm
Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.Collection: Animal
Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?Collection: Spiritual
We are concerned with things. We are concerned with success. We are concerned with money. We are concerned with instrumentalities.Collection: Concerned
The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.Collection: Lying
According to me [Sigmund ] Freud did not notice that the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,resembling in that, poetry or other art forms.Collection: Dream
To be concentrated means to live fully in the present.Collection: Mean
If our supreme value is the development of the Western tradition - of a man for whom the highest thing in life is man, for whom love for man, respect for man, and the dignity of man, are supreme values - then we cannot ask the question that says, "if it is better for our survival, might we drop these values?"Collection: Men
The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.Collection: Way
Man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an "individual," has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.Collection: Integrity
In the dream, sheltered from the noise, the subject expressed a judgment much more on the mark than that manifested in wakefulness.Collection: Dream
If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.Collection: Spheres
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.Collection: Loneliness
The fact is that the culture does not have only positive effects on our intellectual and moral functions but also negative effects.Collection: Intellectual
I understand by socialism a society in which the aim of production is not profit, but the use. In which the individual citizen participates responsibly in his work, and in the whole social organization, and in which he is not a means who is employed by capital.Collection: Mean
The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.Collection: Learning
The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.Collection: Art
Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream.Collection: Dream
We have, in the same way, relegated our own responsibility in what happens to our country to the specialists, who are supposed to take care of it, and the individual citizen does not feel that he can judge, and even that he should judge, and take any responsibility. I think there are quite a number of recent developments which show that.Collection: Country
I have learnt to appreciate the clarity of English language.Collection: Appreciate
If we begin to say, "Well, maybe we can cope better with the Russians if we also transform ourselves into a managed society, if we, as somebody put it the other day, train our soldiers to be like the Turks, who have fought so bravely in Korea, if we are willing to change our whole way of life for the sake of so-called "survival," then I think we do exactly that which threatens our survival.Collection: Thinking
For [Karl] Marx it is socialist society which realizes "concretely" the religious principles of equality, brotherly love, and freedom.Collection: Religious
The individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making.Collection: Decision
By equality, one once understood equality in the very same sense in which the Bible speaks of equality: that we are all equal, inasmuch as we are created in the image of God.Collection: Speak
This Marxian sentence, repeated to the point of boredom, is misinterpreted. In reality [Karl] Marx was a "religious" man.Collection: Religious
We are all equal in the sense that no man must mean - must be - the means for the purposes of another man; but each individual is an end in itself.Collection: Mean
The Russians have succeeded in one thing: they have sold the world the idea that they represent socialism and the ideas of Marx,and we have done the greatest service to their propaganda by agreeing that that's what it is.Collection: Ideas
I see socialism in the direction, of management, of enterprise, by all who work in the enterprise.Collection: Management
We can express ideas without being afraid of being killed or imprisoned.Collection: Ideas
Ger-mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear.Collection: Ends
Actually, if you take the average American, and studies have shown that, he is really concerned only with private affairs; that is to say, with his health, his money and family affairs.Collection: Average
I think [Karl] Marx, Pope John XXIII or Rosa Luxemburg [had achieved the mode of existence].But it would be useless to look at a list of illustrious names.Collection: Thinking
I think the Russians might do away with the terror in twenty or thirty or years, when they are richer, and when they don't need these repressive methods so much.Collection: Thinking
Jewish legend says that the world rests on 36 just men: only thirty six, but their moral strength is immense.Collection: Men
In fact, there are very important writings of Marx which are not even translated into English.Collection: Writing
Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.Collection: Religious
I feel worried, deeply worried, only about one thing - the possibility that we fall... that we cannot avoid an atomic war.Collection: War
[Carl Gustav] Jung was not right when he said that the unconscious message is always written clearly and so there is no need to seek to discover the distortions, because one must recognize that many dreams are more or less distortions.Collection: Dream
In our enthusiasm to dominate nature and to produce more material good - goods - we have transformed means into ends.Collection: Mean
If you do not smile, you are judged lacking in a 'pleasing personality' - and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman, or a physician.Collection: Personality
I think we got off the track, as many societies do, who follow successfully one aim, and yet are not capable of seeing at what point the pursuit of this aim prevents them from following a more total aim. That is to say, they get into a blind alley.Collection: Thinking
We are confronted with the possibility of a war of such destruction that the whole existence of our nation and of the whole world is at stake. And yet, people know it - people read it in the newspapers, people read that at the first attack, a hundred million Americans might be killed. And yet, they talk about it as if they were talking about something being wrong with the carburetor of their car, perhaps.Collection: War
Man can only know the nagation, never the position of ultimate reality.Collection: Reality
On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man's need for collective art and ritual.Collection: Art
If there is no evidence that sport lowers aggression, at the same time it should be said that there is also no evidence that sport is motivated by aggression.Collection: Sports
I think if you ask what people really mean by happiness today, it is the experience of unlimited consumption - the kind of thing Mr. Huxley described in "Brave New World."Collection: Mean
I would say, compared with the 19th century, compared with most previous history, this is as good or better a society than any which man has ever made. But that doesn't mean it is such a good one.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Powerful
Another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every 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.Collection: Tyrants
We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigour, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self; to have faith in this self and in life.Collection: Self