Top 380 Erich Fromm Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “What kind of men, then, does our society need? What is the “social character” suited to twentieth century Capitalism? It needs men who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tasks are standardized and can easily be influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority, or principle, or conscience – yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction.”

— Erich Fromm

202. “Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human man.”

— Erich Fromm

203. “Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God. In this way, he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself, and experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted.”

— Erich Fromm

204. “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

205. “Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan’s principles, since the time of the gospels.”

— Erich Fromm

206. “The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains.”

— Erich Fromm

207. “In the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”

— Erich Fromm

208. “The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation – and creation is always a miracle – is outside of his range of emotional experience.”

— Erich Fromm

209. “Reality imposes its law on man, laws that he can only escape in dreams or in states of trance – or in insanity.”

— Erich Fromm

210. “Once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised. They feel they ought to know everything, and hence that it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised or puzzled by anything.”

— Erich Fromm

211. “To be concentrated means to live fully in the present, in the here and now, and not to think of the next thing to be done, while I am doing something right now.”

— Erich Fromm

212. “Lack of concentration makes one tired, while concentration wakes one up.”

— Erich Fromm

213. “What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.”

— Erich Fromm

214. “The approach of normative humanism is based on the assumption that, as in any other problem, there are right and wrong, satisfactory and unsatisfactory solutions to the problem of human existence.”

— Erich Fromm

215. “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

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

— Erich Fromm

217. “Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.”

— Erich Fromm

218. “Man absolutely cannot live by himself.”

— Erich Fromm

219. “They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity.”

— Erich Fromm

220. “We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for.”

— Erich Fromm

221. “Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure.”

— Erich Fromm

222. “Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.”

— Erich Fromm

223. “The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group.”

— Erich Fromm

224. “Authority is not a quality one person ‘has,’ in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.”

— Erich Fromm

225. “Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.”

— Erich Fromm

226. “Selfishness is not identical with self-love but with its very opposite. Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”

— Erich Fromm

227. “They were more free, but they were more alone.”

— Erich Fromm

228. “Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.”

— Erich Fromm

229. “Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life.”

— Erich Fromm

230. “The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man.”

— Erich Fromm

231. “Any society, in order to survive, must mold the character of its members in such a way that they want to do what they have to do; their social function must become internalized and transformed into something they feel driven to do, rather than something they are obliged to do.”

— Erich Fromm

232. “Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. But those who have not given up hope can succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties.”

— Erich Fromm

233. “All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual.”

— Erich Fromm

234. “It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.”

— Erich Fromm

235. “If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.”

— Erich Fromm

236. “The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs.”

— Erich Fromm

237. “Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.”

— Erich Fromm

238. “Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually interdependent. They are a syndrome of attitudes which are to be found in the mature person; that is, in the person who develops his own powers productively, who only wants to have that which he has worked for, who has given up narcissistic dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, who has acquired humility based on the inner strength which only genuine productive activity can give.”

— Erich Fromm

239. “I only wish to be the fountain of love from which you drink, every drop promising eternal passion.”

— Erich Fromm

240. “To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops.”

— Erich Fromm

241. “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

242. “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.”

— Erich Fromm

243. “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

244. “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

245. “Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain.”

— Erich Fromm

246. “Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one’s identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible.”

— Erich Fromm

247. “Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”

— Erich Fromm

248. “Wer bin ich, wenn ich bin, was ich habe und dann verliere, was ich habe?”

— Erich Fromm

249. “You do many things at once; you read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat, drink. You are the consumer with the open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything – pictures, liquor, knowledge. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To sit still, without talking, smoking, reading, drinking, is impossible for most people. They become nervous and fidgety, and must do something with their mouth or their hands.”

— Erich Fromm

250. “There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.”

— Erich Fromm