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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.

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
War
Easy
Next
Reason
March
Feels
Main
Men
Reasons
Sorry
Dies

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over 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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We are gods with anuses.
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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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 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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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.
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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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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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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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the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
Ernest Becker
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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
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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
Ernest Becker
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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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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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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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