Erich Fromm Quotes

The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

It is, let me say, at the very least by no means self-evident that there is more liberty, equality, and fraternity in the world today than there was one thousand years ago. One might arguably suggest that the opposite is true. I seek to paint no idyll of the worlds before historical capitalism. They were worlds of little liberty, little equality, and little fraternity. The only question is whether historical capitalism represented progress in these regards, or regression.

We must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past.

There is very strong historical data that suggests the way societies grow is by making large, long-term investments.

Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption - ultimately, social and civic disruption.

… the biography of mankind

All fixed capital, not only in the first instance, as is generally admitted, but in every stage of society, at every period in the history of man, is the creation of labour …

In the institution of societies, mankind in all probability thought father of redressing the evils, which they had experienced, than of procuring the several advantages resulting from laws, from commerce, from the arts and sciences, and from all those other improvements so frequently mentioned in history.

What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the [Ancient] Greeks?

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found,—a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,—a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization.

I'm a human who is aware of the history of humanity and the ways in which the movies touch on those things.

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

There is, of course, no complete solution. But we can do something. The chief means open to us is education There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves.

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.

The progress and civilisation of the human race simply mean controlling this nature.

As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end.

The history of mankind is little else than a narrative of designs which have failed and hopes that have been disappointed.

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.

I consider that it is on instruction and education that the future security and direction of the destiny of every nation chiefly and fundamentally rests.

History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes.

The end and goal of any society as it addresses the problem of education is to raise the ability, the initiative and the cultural level, and with all these the survival level of that society.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.