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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.

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
Personal
Use
Death
Another
Men
Assure
Victory
Dying

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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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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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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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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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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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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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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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Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.
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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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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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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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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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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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.
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the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
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.
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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.
Ernest Becker