Quotes for All
Unfortunately, money is more often misused and abused than used intelligently. Most people haven’t figured out how to use money wisely to truly enhance their lives. Most, it seems, act rationally with their money only when they can’t dream up any more irrational ways to spend it. To be sure, financial insanity has developed its … Read more
Many students of dreams, from Plato to [Sigmund] Freud, hold that the sleeping person,deprived of contact with the outside world, regresses temporarily to an irrational primitive mental state. Erich Fromm
Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. … Read more
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group. Erich Fromm
Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. … Read more
The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis. Erich Fromm
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built. Erich Fromm
If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being ‘asocial’ or ‘irrational’ in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation … Read more
Men, believing in myths, will always fear something terrible, everlasting punishment as certain or probable . . . Men base all these fears not on mature opinions, but on irrational fancies, that they are more disturbed by fear of the unknown than by facing facts. Peace of mind lies in being delivered from all these … Read more
To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable. Epictetus