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181 " If we want to Fascism we must understand it. Wishful thinking will not help us. And reciting optimistic formulae will prove to be as inadequate and useless as the ritual of an Indian rain dance. "
― Erich Fromm , Escape from Freedom
182 " Nature is the great power we have to submit to, but living beings are the ones we should dominate. "
183 " Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed towards life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed towards destruction. In other words the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive towards life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive towards destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. "
184 " Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies - either against others or against oneself - are nourished. "
185 " Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds. "
186 " A person even if he is subjectively sincere, may frequently be driven unconsciously by a motive that is different from the one he believes himself to be driven by "
187 " If the individual realizes his self by spontaneous activity and thus relates himself to the world, he ceases to be an isolated atom; he and the world become part of one structuralized whole; he has his rightful place, and thereby his doubt concerning himself and the meaning of life disappears. This doubt sprang from his separateness and from the thwarting of life; when he can live, neither compulsively nor automatically but spontaneously, the doubt disappears. He is aware of himself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. "
188 " The mode of life, as it is determined for the individual by the pecularity of an economic system, becomes the primary factor in determining his whole character structure, because the imperative need for self-preservation forces him to accept the conditions under which he has to live. This does not mean that he cannot try, together with others, to effect certain economic and political changes; But primarily his personality is moulded by the particular mode of life, as he has already been confronted with it as a child through the medium of the family, which represents all the features that are typical of a particular society or class. "
189 " Великое множество проблем, на первый взгляднеразрешимых, тотчас исчезает, как только мы решаемся отказаться отпредставления, будто люди всегда осознают мотивы своих действии, мыслейи чувств; на самом деле их истинные мотивы не обязательно таковы, каким кажется. "
190 " man’s spontaneous activity. It is the security acquired each moment by man’s spontaneous activity. It is the security that only freedom can give, that needs no illusions because it has eliminated those conditions that necessitate illusions. "
191 " the structure of modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and he becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other. "
192 " Большинство людей убеждено, что если их не принуждает открыто какая-либо внешняя сила, то их решения — это их собственные решения, и если они чего-то хотят, то это их собственные желания. Такое представление о себе — одна из величайших наших иллюзий. На самом деле значительная часть наших желаний фактически навязана нам со стороны; нам удается убедить себя, что это мы приняли решение, в то время как на самом деле мы подстраиваемся под желания окружающих, гонимые страхом изоляции или даже более серьезных опасностей, угрожающих нашей жизни "
