Erich Fromm Quotes

The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

The moral foundation of the society, the way we interact with each other is more fundamental than the Supreme Court.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.

Society becomes how we behave.

Culture is more important than politics and government.

It's nature-nurture, right? I've been nurtured by Californians.

I expected social rank to be the determining factor in health, and in some ways that's true. But far more important is what sort of society that rank occurs in. Being low ranking in a benevolent troop is a hell of a lot better for your blood pressure than being low ranking in an aggressive troop.

We need to focus on the kind of human beings we want to have and the kind of society in which we want to live.

All values are important, everyone who has ever touched my life in some way was a mentor for good or bad. Life is a blend, and a person is a blend of all the influences that have touched their lives.

Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.

The history of science is science itself; the history of the individual, the individual.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Nations, like individuals, interest us in their growth.

Where the women go, the culture goes.

In the world I lived in, the world of human people, there were ties and debts and consequences and good deeds. That was what bound people to society; maybe that was what constituted society. And I tried to live in my little niche in it the best way I could.

The conservative values that are emerging, it may not effect architecture immediately but it will effect society and that's what worries me.

Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.

But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior.

The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.