To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.

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

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

...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¢.

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

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.

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