"The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there."
- Ernest Becker
"We are gods with anuses."
"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blin..."
"the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith"
"Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awarness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awarness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provid..."
"Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals."
"Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility."
"People were always ready to yield theirwills, to worship the hero, because they were not given a chancefor developing initiative, stability, and independence, said the greatnineteenth-century Russian ..."
"[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madne..."
"Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoningof the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrainedmaterial production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasiveevil t..."