Since I been looking though Fromm's stuff, because I wanted to cite him in one of RMLP's blogs, I been looking at other neat passages from him. I'll feature a selection here in seperate blogs over the next few days (daze).

This is one of my complete favorites. This single concept alone, so well articulated by Erich, is worth the price of admission to all his books. It is soooo good, but rest assured, the author of "The Art of Loving", has heaps of other insightful passages that help us penetrate appearanced and defog the thought processes.

"Faith in life, in oneself, in others, must be built on the hard rock of realism: that is to say, on the capacity to see evil where it is, to see swindle, destructiveness, and selfishness not only when they are obvious, in in their many disguises and rationalizations. Indeed, faith, love, and hope must go together with such a passion for seeing reality in all its nakedness that the outsider would be prone to call the attitude "cynicism." And cynical it is, when we mean by it there refusal to be taken in by the sweet and plausible lies that cover almost everything that is said and believed. But this kind of "cynicism" is not cynicism: it is uncompromisingly critical, a refusal to play the game in a system of deception. Meister Eckhart expressed this briefly and succinctly when he said that "the simple one" (whom Jesus taught): "He does not decieve, but he is also not decieved."