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What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.

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
Ideas
Monstrous
Self
Worms
Mean
Conscious
Food
Animal
Idea
Means
Doe
Ludicrous

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To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
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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.
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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.
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The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of ex­perience. And the price of this kind of almost extra human crea­tivity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.
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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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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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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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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. 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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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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Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
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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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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
Ernest Becker
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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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We are gods with anuses.
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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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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.
Ernest Becker
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
Ernest Becker
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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
Ernest Becker
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In seeking to avoid evil, humanity is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is our ingenuity, rather than our animal nature, that has given our fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.
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