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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
Lying
Order
Live
Need
Needs
Dooms
Really
Fateful
Never
Doom
Life
Ironic

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
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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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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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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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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
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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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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.
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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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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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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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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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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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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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.
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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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.
Ernest Becker
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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest Becker