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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
Pollution
Environmental
Worship
Speak
Power
Men
Excrement
Devastation
Ecological

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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 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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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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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.
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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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We are gods with anuses.
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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 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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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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 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