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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

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
Culture
Seem
Trembling
Makes
Terrible
Decay
Seems
Simply
Vital
Real
Ways
Immortal
Important
Animal
Someday
Way
Small
Admit
Men
Dies
Tells
World
Universe
Changes

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
Ernest Becker
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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
Ernest Becker
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
Ernest Becker
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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
Ernest Becker
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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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Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
Ernest Becker
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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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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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We are gods with anuses.
Ernest Becker
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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.
Ernest Becker
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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.
Ernest Becker
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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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To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
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.
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
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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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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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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.
Ernest Becker
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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
Ernest Becker
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
Ernest Becker