The Echo of Greece (1957)
Context: What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing. Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business, possessed of great wealth, in which all citizens had a right to share... Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result... If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms.
“By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents — blood, family, tribe — to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.”
Credo (1965)
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Erich Fromm 119
German social psychologist and psychoanalyst 1900–1980Related quotes
Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
Source: Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values (1980), p. 51.
1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)
“To be a mother is to nourish and protect true humanity and bring it to development.”
Essays on Woman (1996), The Significance of Woman's Intrinsic Value in National Life (1928)
Context: To be a mother is to nourish and protect true humanity and bring it to development. But again, this necessitates that she possess true humanity herself, and that she is clear as to what it means; otherwise, she cannot lead others to it. One can become suitable for this double duty if one has the correct personal attitude.
Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 5.
“A mother’s traditional role prepared her to love her family by being with the family she loved.”
Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)
“Human-machine symbiosis goes beyond sexbots to develop empathy and relationship.”
Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016
Non-Fiction, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)