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

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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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.
Ernest Becker
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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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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem
Ernest Becker
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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest Becker
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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
Ernest Becker
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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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The real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this,makes man seem important,vital to the universe. immortal in some ways
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It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
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the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
Ernest Becker
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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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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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Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
Ernest Becker
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We are gods with anuses.
Ernest Becker
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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.
Ernest Becker
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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.
Ernest Becker
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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
Ernest Becker
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
Ernest Becker
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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.
Ernest Becker