647 Quotes by Erich Fromm

The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own.

Mother’s love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there it is as if all the beauty had gone out of life.

But man is not only made by history – history is made by man.

We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.

If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue – and not a vice – to love myself, since I am a human being too.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind – not the fiend or the sadist.

Love is the productive form of relatedness to others and to oneself. It implies responsibility, care, respect. If it isn’t productive and respectful, it isn’t love, but only fear masquerading as love.

The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love.

Human existence begins when the lack of fixation of action by instincts exceeds a certain point; when the adaptation to nature loses its coercive character; when the way to act is no longer fixed by hereditarily given mechanisms. In other words, human existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable. Freedom is here used not in its positive sense of “freedom to” but in its negative sense of “freedom from”, namely freedom from instinctual determination of his actions.