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"The more man gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an 'individual,' he has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world that destroys his freedom and the integrity of his individual self."
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"Christianity is not an accretion, it is not something added. It is a new total outlook which is satisfied with nothing less than penetration to the furthest corners of the mind and the understanding."
"As we cast our frightened eyes around for something that is real and true and enduring, we are turning once more to this ancient Book [the Bible] that has given consolation, comfort, and salvation to millions in the centuries past."
"By the 1960s the United States had a new ruling class-the teenager!"
"There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory."
"A great problem in America is that we have an anemic and watered-down Christianity that has produced an anemic, watered-down, and spineless Christian who is not willing to stand up and be counted on every issue."
"The feet of the Christian need to tread the narrow path that the Savior trod, keeping in step with Him."
"Life is not a sport. Life is not math. There is no final end goal and there is no right answer. Just because your truth does not match someone else's truth does not make either of you wrong. Life is not a zero sum game. If I am right, that does not make you wrong. If you are right, that does not make me wrong either. A jar of vinegar can sit in a cupboard beside a box of baking soda peacefully, and we can allow those who disagree with us to exist alongside us without reacting to them. There is nothing to prove. There is enough room in the world for all of us."
"I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity."
"What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?"
"The whole world ought to know the story of the Bible."
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."
"The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life."
"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."
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