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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
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More Quotes by Erich Fromm
If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being 'asocial' or 'irrational' in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness
If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Respect is not fear and awe; it...[is]the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.Fromm
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.
The deepest need of the human being is to overcome our separateness, to leave the prison of our loneliness.
