Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.
Ernest BeckerOne 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.
Ernest BeckerIn seeking to avoid evil, humanity is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is our ingenuity, rather than our animal nature, that has given our fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.
Ernest BeckerWhen 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
Ernest Becker