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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.

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
Worship
Speak
Power
Men
Excrement
Devastation
Ecological
Pollution
Environmental

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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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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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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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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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.
Ernest Becker
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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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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 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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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 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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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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
Ernest Becker
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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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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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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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We are gods with anuses.
Ernest Becker
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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
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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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
Ernest Becker