Quotes from Ernest Becker

We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves.

To suffer one's death and to be reborn is not easy." And it is not easy precisely because so much of one has to die.

As Kierkegaard sums it up "The loss of possibility signifies either that everything has become necessary to man or that everything has become trivial. Actually, in the extreme of depressive psychosis, we seem to see the merger of these two. Everything becomes necessary and trivial at the same time, which leads to complete despair.

This is the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven.

Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams.

He is a prodigy in limbo. In both halves

One chooses slavery because it is safe and meaningful; then one loses the meaning of it, but fears to move out of it. One has literally died to life but must remain physically in this world.

In other words, the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one's own death, which is the peculiar sentence on man alone in the animal kingdom

To be sure, primitives often celebrate death—as Hocart and others have shown—because they believe that death is the ultimate promotion, the final ritual elevation to a higher form of life, to the enjoyment of eternity in some form. Most modern Westerners have trouble believing this any more, which is what makes the fear of death so prominent a part of our psychological make-up.

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this yet to die.

And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth. There has been so much brilliant writing, so many genial discoveries, so vast an extension and elaboration of these discoveries—yet the mind is silent as the world spins on its age-old demonic career.

world arms budget of 204 billion dollars

Why, then, the reader may ask, add still another weighty tome to a useless overproduction?

I have tried to avoid moving against and negating any point of view, no matter how personally antipathetic to me, if it seems to have in it a core of truthfulness.

Be like father, but don't do like father

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false.

Traditional religion turned the consciousness of sin into a condition for salvation; but the tortured sense of nothingness of the neurotic qualifies him now only for miserable extinction, for merciful release in lonely death.

Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be 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, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression--and with all this yet to die.

It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.

By making your hero-system the service of your Creator, you have the distinction of making a gift of your life no matter what the special quality of that gift is: as you last out your life with courage, forbearance, and dignity you affirm your divine calling by simply living it out.

The reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility.

A few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over.

The best way to get cooperation among volatile, erotic primates is to regulate sexual relations—who can mate with whom, who can live with whom regularly, and so on. By setting up such customs and marriage taboos you establish families and provide sexual partners between families. In a word, the invention of sexual codes establishes harmony and cooperation in mating units, and in bands composed of such units.

has lost the only audience for whom the plot in which he was performing was valid. He is left in the hopeless despair of the actor who knows only one set of lines and loses the one audience who wants to hear it