Fromm Quotes

• I read a book in the late 1990s called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm, and it had a profound impact on me. Fromm takes Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am" and changes it to "I effect, therefore I am."

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Book, Thinking, Impact

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

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• ...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.

  Ernest Becker

  Men, Self, People

  "The Denial of Death". Book by Ernest Becker, 1973.

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• Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet's challenges. We're "soft-wired" for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities.

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Compassion, Expression, Empathy

  "Frances Moore Lappe on Creating an Ecology of Hope". Interview with Mark Karlin, www.truth-out.org. December 26, 2011.

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• A fact must be assimilated with, or discriminated fromm, some other fact or facts, in order to be raised to the dignity of a truth, and made to convey the least knowledge to the mind.

  Henry Mayhew

  Order, Mind, Facts

  Henry Mayhew (1851). “London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those that Will Work, Those that Cannot Work, and Those that Will Not Work”, p.157

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• The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it man's 'recall to himself' as Heidegger and later Fromm have argued, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such.

  Rollo May

  Lying, Fate, Men

  Rollo May (1969). “Love and will”

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