Biblio
Filters: Author is Erich Fromm [Clear All Filters]
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
(1973). "Power can mean power over people, or it can mean power to do things...Many writers, unfortunately, make use of this ambiguous meaning of the words 'power' and 'control', and in order to smuggle in the praise of 'power over' they identify it with 'power to'. Moreover, lack of control does not mean lack of any kind of organization, but only of those kinds in which the control is exploitative and the controlled cannot control the controllers." (p. 394)
"Being powerless and hence in danger of being enslaved, or having power and hence in danger of becoming dehumanized, are two evils. Which is to be shunned the most is a matter of religious and moral or political conviction." (p. 395)
Escape From Freedom.
(1994). "The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness. Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours." (p. 288)
The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil.
(1968). "The very need to achieve something creative makes it necessary to leave the closed circle of group solipsism and to be interested in the object it wants to achieve." (p. 94)
Man For Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics.
(1970). "Since modern man experiences himself as both the seller and the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is 'successful,' he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless." (p. 72)
The Sane Society.
(1955). "[Man] is part of the machine, rather than its master as an active agent. The machine, instead of being in his service to do work for him which once had to be performed by sheer physical energy, has become his master. Instead of the machine being the substitute for human energy, man has become a substitute for the machine. His work can be defined as the performance of acts which cannot yet be performed by machines." (p. 180)
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