"Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way; but only "almost."
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Quote collection
Erich Fromm quotes (page 14 of 22)
426 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile."
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"Our vitality, and the vitality of each nation, rests on the sincerity and depth of the faith in the ideas which it announces, or pronounces."
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"Today, we talk a lot about equality, but I think what most people mean by it is sameness - that everybody is the same - and they are afraid if they are not the same, they are not equal."
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"The criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all men, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence."
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"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."
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"Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain."
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"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."
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"The average American never loses his sleep about affairs which relate to his society and to our whole country."
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"Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it."
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"The activity at this very moment must be the only thing that matters, to which one is fully given. If one is concentrated, it matters little what one is doing. The important, as well as the unimportant things, assume a new dimension of reality, because they have one's full attention."
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"Love is the productive form of relatedness to others and to oneself. It implies responsibility, care, respect. If it isn't productive and respectful, it isn't love, but only fear masquerading as love."
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"Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions."
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"It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health."
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"The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event."
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"Loving becomes, and the ability to love, becomes one of the most important things in life."
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"People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love , power , fame , revenge . Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent."
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"We substitute, or we rather hide, this fear of real intimacy by a superficial kind of friendliness, which is quite nice, but nevertheless, very shallow."
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"Man absolutely cannot live by himself."
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"There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices."
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