جوهر الإنسان Quotes

“Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either "have" or "have not." In fact, there is no such thing as "freedom" except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life.”
― Erich Fromm, El corazón del hombre: Su potencia para el bien y para el mal

“The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life - freedom.”
― Erich Fromm, El corazón del hombre: Su potencia para el bien y para el mal

“Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.”
― Erich Fromm, El corazón del hombre: Su potencia para el bien y para el mal

“In fact, any theory which does not change within sixty years is, by this very fact, no longer the same as the original theory of the master; it is a fossilized repetition, and by being a repetition it is actually a deformation. Freud’s basic discoveries were conceived in a certain philosophical frame of reference, that of the mechanistic materialism current among most natural scientists at the beginning of this century. I believe that the further development of Freud’s thought requires a different philosophical frame of reference, that of dialectic humanism.”
― Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil

“life is never certain, never predictable, never controllable; in order to make life controllable it must be transformed into death; death, indeed, is the only certainty in life.”
― Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil

“The question of who claimed defense rightly is usually decided by the victors, and sometimes only much later by more objective historians.”
― Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil

“But if most men have been sheep, why is it that man’s life is so different from that of sheep? His history has been written in blood; it is a history of continuous violence, in which almost invariably force has been used to bend his will. Did Talaat Pasha alone exterminate millions of Armenians? Did Hitler alone exterminate millions of Jews? Did Stalin alone exterminate millions of political enemies? These men were not alone; they had thousands of men who killed for them, tortured for them, and who did so not only willingly but with pleasure. Do we not see man’s inhumanity to man everywhere—in ruthless warfare, in murder and rape, in the ruthless exploitation of the weaker by the stronger, and in the fact that the sighs of the tortured and suffering creature have so often fallen on deaf ears and hardened hearts? All these facts have led thinkers like Hobbes to the conclusion that homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to his fellow man); they have led many of us today to the assumption that man is vicious and destructive by nature, that he is a killer who can be restrained from his favorite pastime only by fear of more powerful killers.”
― Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil

“It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.”
― Erich Fromm, جوهر الإنسان

“El hombre sólo puede ser humano en un clima en el que pueda esperar que él y sus hijos vivirán para ver el año siguiente y muchos más años por vivir.”
― Erich Fromm, El corazón del hombre: Su potencia para el bien y para el mal