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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
Humans
Deny
Self
Roots
Existential
Men
Image
Urge
Achieve
Mortality
Causes
Urges
Evil
Heroic
Natural
Root
Human
Inevitable

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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 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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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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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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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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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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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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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.
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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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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