Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker
Ernest Beckerwas a Jewish-American cultural anthropologist and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth27 September 1924
sorry war men
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.
fun men play
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.
inspirational-life men anxiety
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.
religious real men
When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem
sports men feds
For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
drinking men shopping
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.
death destiny men
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.
men victory dying
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
men self giving
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.
men self roots
Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
real animal men
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
men extinction insignificance
What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.
mean animal men
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. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would crate such a complex and fancy worm food?
men evil victory
The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.