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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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Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Achieve
Mortality
Causes
Urges
Evil
Heroic
Natural
Root
Human
Inevitable
Humans
Deny
Self
Roots
Existential
Men
Image
Urge

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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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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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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We are gods with anuses.
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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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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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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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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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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
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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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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
Ernest Becker