Erich Fromm Quotes

If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it, through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not matter.

The condition of our survival in any but the meagerest existence is our willingness to accommodate ourselves to the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world.

Man is a social animal formed to please in society.

Nothing is more evident, I venture to think, as a result of two or three thousand years of social philosophizing, than that society must live and thrive by way of the native impulses of individual human beings.

Necessity reconciles and brings men together; and this accidental connection afterward forms itself into laws.

Society is a kind of parent to its members. If it, and they, are to thrive, its values must be clear, coherent and generally acceptable.

The ideal society has yet to be built - one which balances nicely collective well-being and individual well-being.

I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other ... Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it's enough.

The central law of all wholesome life is reciprocity, mutuality. ... But the group is valuable only as it permits personalities, not automatons, to emerge.

Believe it or not, that was the first time I recognized that in some ways she was just like the rest of us.

The Welfare of Each of Us Is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us

No man's nature is able to know what is best for the social state of man; or, knowing, always able to do what is best.

A Separation Psychology produces a Separation Sociology, a way of socializing with each other that encourages the entire human society to act as separate entities serving their own separate interests.

What is often being argued, it seems to me, in the idea of nature is the idea of man; and this not only generally, or in ultimate ways, but the idea of man in society, indeed the ideas of kinds of societies.

In our age the common religious perception of men is the consciousness of the brotherhood of man - we know that the well-being of man lies in the union with his fellow men. True science should indicate the various methods of applying this consciousness to life. Art should transform this perception into feeling.

And it is characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state.

Ultimately we're all faced with the same things and that's what brings us together. It's just human nature to be terrified and that doesn't necessarily manifest itself in completely different ways.

Loving behavior contributes to the group at the expense of the individual. Competition contributes to the survival of the individual at the expense of the group. In the garden of life, some people are more like flowers, and other people are more like weeds.

The only difference between man and man all the world over is one of degree, and not of kind, even as there is between trees of the same species. Where in is the cause for anger, envy or discrimination?

Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.

Governments and entire planets are important, Threepio. But when you sift everything down, they're all just made of people.

We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate eachother or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs.

Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.

Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.

Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.