Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “People have committed suicide because of their failure to realize the passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Cases of suicide because of a lack of sexual satisfaction are virtually nonexistent.”

— Erich Fromm

102. “Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others.”

— Erich Fromm

103. “In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.”

— Erich Fromm

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104. “Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.”

— Erich Fromm

105. “Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.”

— Erich Fromm

106. “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.”

— Erich Fromm

107. “Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.”

— Erich Fromm

108. “The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.”

— Erich Fromm

109. “On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man’s need for collective art and ritual.”

— Erich Fromm

110. “Integrity simply means not violating one’s own identity.”

— Erich Fromm

111. “Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.”

— Erich Fromm

112. “Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.”

— Erich Fromm

113. “To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.”

— Erich Fromm

114. “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.”

— Erich Fromm

115. “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.”

— Erich Fromm

116. “The courage of the authoritarian character is essentially a courage to suffer what fate or its personal representative or “leader” may have destined him for. To suffer without complaining is his highest virtue – not the courage of trying to end suffering or at least to diminish it. Not to change fate, but to submit to it, is the heroism of the authoritarian character.”

— Erich Fromm

117. “That human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which was made very explicitly by Freud, most extensively in his Civilization and Its Discontent.”

— Erich Fromm

118. “We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”

— Erich Fromm

119. “The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.”

— Erich Fromm

120. “Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy.”

— Erich Fromm

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121. “The full humanization of man requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation, from selfishness and egotism to solidarity and altruism.”

— Erich Fromm

122. “Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself – to his reason and his conscience – and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.”

— Erich Fromm

123. “The task of critique is not to denounce the ideals, but to show their transformation into ideologies, and to challenge the ideology in the name of the betrayed ideal.”

— Erich Fromm

124. “It is desirable to avoid trivial and evil company altogether – unless one can assert oneself fully, and thus make the other doubt his own position.”

— Erich Fromm

125. “The value judgments we make determine our actions, and upon their validity rests our mental health and happiness.”

— Erich Fromm

126. “It seems that great minds a hundred years ago saw what would happen today or tomorrow, while we to whom it is happening blind ourselves in order not to be disturbed in our daily routine.”

— Erich Fromm

127. “But man is not only made by history – history is made by man.”

— Erich Fromm

128. “Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason.”

— Erich Fromm

129. “The mature response to the problem of existence is love.”

— Erich Fromm

130. “The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.”

— Erich Fromm

131. “The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.”

— Erich Fromm

132. “There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.”

— Erich Fromm

133. “In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”

— Erich Fromm

134. “Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of unaliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it.”

— Erich Fromm

135. “All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.”

— Erich Fromm

136. “The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle.”

— Erich Fromm

137. “The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.”

— Erich Fromm

138. “Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.”

— Erich Fromm

139. “It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.”

— Erich Fromm

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140. “If there is no evidence that sport lowers aggression, at the same time it should be said that there is also no evidence that sport is motivated by aggression.”

— Erich Fromm

141. “Freedom does not mean license.”

— Erich Fromm

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

— Erich Fromm

143. “The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.”

— Erich Fromm

144. “To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge to overcome makes us stronger, rather than unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage.”

— Erich Fromm

145. “The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love.”

— Erich Fromm

146. “Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love – yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love. This.”

— Erich Fromm

147. “The passion for having must lead to never-ending class war. The pretense of the communists that their system will end class struggle by abolishing classes is fiction, for their system is based on the principle of unlimited consumption as the goal of living. As long as everybody wants to have more, there must be formations of classes, there must be class war, and in global terms, there must be international war. Greed and peace preclude each other.”

— Erich Fromm

148. “Man always dies before he is fully born.”

— Erich Fromm

149. “Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.”

— Erich Fromm

150. “Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.”

— Erich Fromm