Equality today means ‘sameness’, rather than ‘oneness’. Erich Fromm More Quotes by Erich Fromm More Quotes From Erich Fromm 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. Erich Fromm passion confusion lying If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals...We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities. Erich Fromm our-love political people I think, to be specific, we got off the track when we concentrated more and more on production of things. Thereby, we created a split between intellect and emotion, because, in order to produce a modern technique, you have to use intellect, and we have created men who are very brilliant, who are very clever, but our emotional life has become impoverished. Erich Fromm emotional clever men We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and love. Erich Fromm growth love reality There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices. Erich Fromm choices inspirational reality Whether...a change from the supremacy of natural science to a new social science will take place...depends on one factor: how many brilliant, learned, disciplined, and caring men and women are attracted by the new challenge. Erich Fromm caring challenges men The history of man so far is nothing to brag about, from the standpoint of our ideas - and what I mean is, that in comparison with most other societies, our present-day American society has achieved things which are remarkable: material wealth, greater than for any other nation; a relative freedom from oppression; a relative mobility; a spreading of art, of music, of thought, which is also rather unique. Erich Fromm unique mean art I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism. Erich Fromm lasts personality believe In the dream, sheltered from the noise, the subject expressed a judgment much more on the mark than that manifested in wakefulness. Erich Fromm judgment noise dream 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. Erich Fromm nice kind real Man absolutely cannot live by himself. Erich Fromm helping-others men people Love is not easy. All great religions postulate love as one of the greatest accomplishments. If it were that easy, or as easy as most people think, certainly, the great religious leaders would have been rather naive. Erich Fromm religious love-is thinking If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either. Erich Fromm productive spheres ifs [Sigmund Freud] makes the interpretation of dreams extremely simple: it deals in substance with discovering what unconscious desires, distorted but recognizable, are hid-den in the dream. Instead, for me the dream is a mixture of thoughts and sensations that man has when he is asleep, a mental state relatively protected from the constant noise that society makes. Erich Fromm simple dream men The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of ‘falling’ in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of ‘standing’ in love. Erich Fromm being-in-love falling-in-love lying Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Love is not a spontaneous feeling, a thing that you fall into, but is something that requires thought, knowledge, care, giving, and respect. And it is something that is rare and difficult to find in capitalism, which commodifies human activity. Erich Fromm love-is art fall 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? Erich Fromm revenge spiritual jesus The only concern which I have today is that we have a policy, a foreign policy, which enables us to avoid a catastrophe; which, if one understands it properly, is indescribable. Erich Fromm foreign-policy concern today The average American never loses his sleep about affairs which relate to his society and to our whole country. Erich Fromm sleep average country 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. Erich Fromm mean people thinking
