Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. – Erich Fromm
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them. – Erich Fromm
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? – Erich Fromm
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love. – Erich Fromm
In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards. – Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950