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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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Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Call
Lying
Jointly
Everyone
Roughly
Lives
Establish
Thing
Liars
Sanity
Lies
Normal

More quotes by Ernest Becker

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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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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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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.
Ernest Becker
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We are gods with anuses.
Ernest Becker
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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.
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What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
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.
Ernest Becker