Erich Fromm Quotes

You can very easily be turned into a commodity. I've grown up with it.

Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.p97.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots.

I think we've been dulled by capitalism. We're just blobs now - we're so worried about how we can keep paying the lease on the car, the mortgage, the lease on the toaster and all that. You can't really think about much else. If you lose that, you lose the whole lot.

Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.

There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.

sex is a commodity just like anything else.

None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what work has produced. - The Society of The Spectacle

Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. Each man is valued at what he will bring in the marketplace. Meaning has been drained from work and assigned instead to remuneration.

The whole world is simply nothing more than a flow chart for capital.

The market controls everything, but the market has no heart.

The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.

I mean, anything that money can be made off will never be a problem to make, no matter what it is.

Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.

I hate being thought of as a product.

I don't like that I'm my own commodity, that I am what I sell.

We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.

The relentless pressures of the so-called marketplace have distorted all our culture industries.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the laborer.

... idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy in which man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

Everything is for sale if the price is right.