Quote

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
Happy
Enemies
Mutilate
War
Foreign
Cleverly
Popular
Valve
Safety
Sociological
Hatred
Ruling
Kill
Occasion
Enemy
Classes
Class
Occasions
Diverts

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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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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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over 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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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.
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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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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We are gods with anuses.
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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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
Ernest Becker
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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
Ernest Becker
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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
Ernest Becker
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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.
Ernest Becker
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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
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
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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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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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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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Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
Ernest Becker