Quotes by Erich Fromm

Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

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

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

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind – not the fiend or the sadist.

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

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

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.