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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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Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Kill
Occasion
Classes
Enemy
Occasions
Diverts
Class
Enemies
Mutilate
Happy
Foreign
Cleverly
War
Popular
Valve
Safety
Sociological
Hatred
Ruling

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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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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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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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
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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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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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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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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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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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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 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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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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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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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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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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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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over 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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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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