More Quotes by Erich Fromm
The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion.
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love
The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.
Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.
A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism
We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.
