Erich Fromm Quotes

Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever.

A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.

I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The individual is prior to society and society must be ordered to the good of the individual.

If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbors, or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery, and not that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable, and for the preservation of which our government has been charged.

There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude.

The supreme belief of our society is the dignity and freedom of the individual. To the respect of that dignity, to the defense of that freedom, all effort is pledged.

Do not turn yourself from an end into a means-one does not justify the other.

...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.

Duty does not require any person to submit to the destruction of his personal ambitions and the right to live his own life in his own way.

The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.

Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.

The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.

What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.

Who knows? Maybe my life belongs to God. Maybe it belongs to me. But I do know one thing: I'm damned if it belongs to the government.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.

All lives have an equal value.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.

Moral principles of liberty that endow a person with the right to claim and acquire property at the same time oblige that person to respect every other person’s equal right to do the same.

For why should my freedom be judged by another’s conscience?