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To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.

Ernest Becker

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Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Rumble
Terror
Fully
Awareness
Live
Everything
Underlies

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If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themselves normal.
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One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.
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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
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To live is to play at the meaning of life...The upshot of this . . . is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men.
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War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
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We might say that both the artist and theneurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project.
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The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
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The manager asks how and when the leader asks what and why - Warren Bennis, Leadership Guru It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief
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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
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Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.
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What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.
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The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed.
Ernest Becker
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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.
Ernest Becker
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We are gods with anuses.
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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
Ernest Becker