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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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Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Life
Ironic
Lying
Order
Live
Need
Needs
Dooms
Really
Fateful
Never
Doom

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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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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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
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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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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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
Ernest Becker
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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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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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Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
Ernest Becker