Quotes from Ernest Becker

The important conclusion for us is that the groups use the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges.

The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die.

the human condition is just too much for an animal to take; it is overwhelming.

Much of the loss of temper that we see in family life and in intimate friendships and courtships stems from simply hearing the wrong things at the wrong times.

everybody has to think and see for himself, or the nations are doomed.

For ages, when philosophers talked about the core of man they referred to it as his essence, something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found; man's peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

The thing that has to be explained in human relations is precisely the fascination of the person who holds or symbolizes power. There is something about him that seems to radiate out to others and to melt them into his aura, a "fascinating effect," as Christine Olden called it, of "the narcissistic personality"3 or, as Jung preferred to call him, the "mana-personality.

Cultural relativity is a pitiless weapon precisely because it sets our hero-systems up on end.

Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom.

In other words, as long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. Faith poses a new life task, the adventure in openness to a multidimensional reality.

Every group, however small or great, has, as such, an individual impulse for eternalization, which manifests itself in the creation of and care for national, religious, and artistic heroes...the individual paves the way for this collective eternity impulse....

Only by proper performance in a social context does the individual fashion and renew himself by purposeful action in a world of shared meaning.

No matter how many churches are closed or how humanistic a leader or a movement may claim to be, there will never be anything wholly secular about human fear. Man's terror is always holy terror-which is a strikingly apt popular phrase. Terror always refers to the ultimates of life and death.

To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics—what we might call "prison heroism": the smugness of the insiders who "know.

This is the uniquely human need, what man everywhere is really all about—each person's need to be an object of primary value, a heroic contributor to world-life—the heroic contributor to the destiny of man.

every human being is… equally unfree, that is, we… create out of freedom, a prison….

There is no doubt that creative work is itself done under a compulsion often indistinguishable from a purely clinical obsession. In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed.

neurosis as a problem of character and have seen that it can be approached in two ways: as a problem of too much narrowness toward the world or of too much openness.

With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer

the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie.

When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as "religious" as any other, this is what he meant: "civilized" society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal.

Man is naturally humble, naturally grateful, naturally guilty, naturally transcended, naturally a sufferer; he is small, pitiful, weak, a passive taker who tucks himself naturally in a beyond of superior, awesome, all-embracing power.

There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on and on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression.

Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.) —SPINOZA