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"The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life."
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"To say 'I want to have sex with this person' is to express a desire which is not intellectually directed in the way that 'I want to eradicate poverty in the world' is an intellectually directed desire. Furthernore, the gratification of sexual desire can only ever give temporary satisfaction. Thus as Nagarjuna, the great Indian scholar said: 'When you have an itch, you scratch. But not to itch at all is better than any amount of scratching."

"I have a copy of you in my brain, when you make me angry I do very bad things to you."

"When animals behave like humans or when humans behave like animals, don't be surprised because in every animal there is a human and in every human there is an animal!"

"Help does not come from anywhere outside - it comes only from within ourselves."

"To open door to hatred is to open one's spirit to misery."

"Express your regrets to the right people and you will be encouraged positively."

"Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history."

"Negative thoughts about ourselves steals our energy."

"Dwelling on thoughts gives birth to feelings."

"I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely."
Explore more quotes by Erich Fromm

"Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality."

"What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay."

"Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology."

"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."

"Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function."

"An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and "belonging." On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present."

"The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life."

"The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep."

"Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one 'object' of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."

"The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things."
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