Erich Fromm

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As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.
Erich Fromm

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

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 ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Erich Fromm

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm

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

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.
Erich Fromm

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
Erich Fromm

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
Erich Fromm

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
Erich Fromm

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.
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

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

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

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
Erich Fromm

Man always dies before he is fully born.
Erich Fromm

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Erich Fromm

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
Erich Fromm

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

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
Erich Fromm

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