136 Quotes by Ernest Becker

Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

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

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.

Horror alone brings peace of mind.

Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.

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.

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.

Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.

Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.