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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
Dying
Personal
Use
Death
Another
Men
Assure
Victory

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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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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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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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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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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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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We are gods with anuses.
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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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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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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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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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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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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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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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 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 best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
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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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