Becker Quotes & Sayings

You do a lot of concatenating when you're an Oulipian — Daniel Levin Becker

We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world. — Carl Lotus Becker

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours. — Ernest Becker

Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the "others", disavowal of any personal dignity and freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces. — Ernest Becker

My work on human capital began with an effort to calculate both private and social rates of return to men, women, blacks, and other groups from investments in different levels of education. — Gary Becker

People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves — Ernest Becker

Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn't bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the "character defenses": he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn't have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the "ways of the world. — Ernest Becker

Intimacy with a beloved pet or special animal makes millions of people feel as though they win the lottery every day. — Marty Becker

Human capital analysis starts with the assumption that individuals decide on their education, training, medical care, and other additions to knowledge and health by weighing the benefits and costs. Benefits include cultural and other non-monetary gains along with improvement in earnings and occupations, while costs usually depend mainly on the foregone value of the time spent on these investments. — Gary Becker

I lean back. "What the hell are you doing?"
"What do you mean?" she asks, innocently batting her eyelashes against the hot sun beaming down on us.
Is she kidding me?
"Where's you toungue?" I ask stupidly.
Her wet little eyebrows furrow. "In my mouth. Why, where's it supposed to be? — Simone Elkeles

I've heard many times that people would make a comment, 'This looks like a bomb,' and still open it. That's one for the psychologists to answer. — Gavin De Becker

I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all. - Leo Rosten — Joshua Becker

There are interviewers who try to trip up the candidate," says Hanold. "If you make people do intellectual gymnastics, you're not getting their true self. There is no right answer to any question I ask. I want an authentic response." To — Ethan F. Becker

There is an unmistakable freedom that accompanies contentment: a freedom to be who you are, enjoy who you are, and live the life you were destined to live. — Josh Becker

I believed in raising my children as I had been raised. — Boris Becker

Gratitude is a discipline, not an emotion. — Josh Becker

The absence of adult males upsets the natural order in our species and in others. For example, game wardens in South Africa recently had to kill several teenage male elephants that had uncharacteristically become violent. These young elephants behaved like a contemporary street gang - and perhaps for the same reason: There were no adult males in their lives. To solve the problem, park officials imported adult male elephants from outside the area. Almost immediately, the remaining juveniles stopped misbehaving. Testosterone ungoverned by experience is dangerous, and older males temper the craving for dominance - merely by being dominant themselves. — Gavin De Becker

You see Boris Becker, Mats Wilander, Nadal, Pete Sampras - they were all great when they were young. As a coach, you can see that type of talent at an early age. — Brad Gilbert

My son regressed. I have my own thoughts on that, just as all parents do. It doesn't mean that I would ever think of another parent as ignorant or stupid if they think differently about their own child.

If we are to be a community, then we need to be heard as a community and not as warring factions. Support each other. — Liz Becker

The greatest polluting element in the earth's environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields. I consider that to be a far greater threat on a global scale than warming, or the increase of chemical elements in the environment. — Robert O. Becker

Randomness and lack of warning are the attributes of human violence we fear most, but you now know that human violence is rarely random and rarely without warning. — Gavin De Becker

If we studied any other creature in nature and found the record of intra-species violence that human beings have, we would be repulsed by it. We'd view it as a great perversion of natural law - but we wouldn't deny it. — Gavin De Becker

The past is the occupational realm of historians - their daily work - and scholars have debated what their stance toward these social issues should be. As citizens and professionals, historians may naturally form a desire, as Carl Becker puts it, "to do work in the world." That is, they might aspire to write history that is not only of scholarly value but also has a salutary impact in society. Becker defines the appropriate impact and the historian's proper role as "correcting and rationalizing for common use Mr. Everyman's mythological adaption of what actually happened."

That process is never simple, however, when the subject involves divisions so deep that they led to civil wars. One issue that inevitably leads to controversy is the extent to which history involves moral judgment. Another is the power of myths, exerting their influence on society and acting in opposition to the findings of historical research [190 - 91]. — Paul D. Escott

Geffrey Davis interrogates masculinity- as brother, son, father, lover-to examine the sources of love's enduring and failed aspects ... I admire Davis' emotional vocabulary, his attentive generosity and tenderness. Keep your eye on this gifted newcomer. — Robin Becker

Sexual predators often start with nonsexual touch to desensitize their targets. It might be "accidental" touch, or hugs, pats, strokes, hair-brushing, holding. A — Gavin De Becker

Intuition is always right in at least two important ways;
It is always in response to something.
it always has your best interest at heart — Gavin De Becker

Learn to enjoy things without owning them. Ownership is nothing, access is everything. Visit a library, a park, or a museum. — Joshua Becker

Ordinary citizens can encounter violence at their jobs to the point that homicide is now the leading cause of death for women in the workplace. — Gavin De Becker

That is, whether or not an act is considered deviant depends upon how it is labeled (defined) by other people. For example, in a well-known study of jazz musicians, Becker (1963) found marijuana use to be considered normal by the musicians, but labeled as illegal, deviant behavior by the larger society, and subject to sanctions like arrest, fines, and jail terms. Although labeling theory pertained to deviance generally, several studies focused on the mental patient experience in which persons once treated for mental illness found it difficult to shed the label of "former mental patient" even if the experience was in the past and the person supposedly cured (Scheff [1966] 1999). — William C. Cockerham

If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it ... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself. — Ernest Becker

Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life. As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. he must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it. We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves. Technically we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one's inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition. — Ernest Becker

The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead.10 There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself. — Ernest Becker

Still the most magical day of my life was the day I became a mom. — Linda Becker

Armed with an awareness of how investors value intangibles, — Brian E. Becker

Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time. — Gary Becker

I encourage women to ask other women for help when they need it, and it's likewise safer to accept an offer from a woman than from a man. (Unfortunately, women rarely make such offers to other women, and I wish more would.) I — Gavin De Becker

We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional ... I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

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

Man must always imagine and believe in a "second" reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature. — Ernest Becker

Every human behavior can be explained by what precedes it, but that does not excuse it, — Gavin De Becker

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else. — Ernest Becker

The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world. — Carl Becker

For a year, I had all sorts of weirdos coming on to me. — Boris Becker

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to
live at all. — Ernest Becker

Winning is a way of expressing yourself. — Boris Becker

Corporations have at different times been so far unable to distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of lying that their freedom has to be curbed. — Carl L. Becker

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive. — Ernest Becker

A woman is expected, first and foremost, to respond to every communication from a man. — Gavin De Becker

We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive. — Gavin De Becker

Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt. — Ernest Becker

Routines provide an avenue to work through fear. He knew where we were going and what to expect and could make plans to conquer specific fears as all else was the same. It allowed focus. — Liz Becker

Girls are a distraction and can easily cost points. — Boris Becker

Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem. — Howard S. Becker

Horror alone brings peace of mind. — Ernest Becker

I think if we push the analysis to its ultimate point we have to say that each earthly father accuses us of our impotence if we become truly creative personalities; they remind us that we are born of men and not gods. No living person can give genius the powers it needs to shoulder the meaning of the world. — Ernest Becker

This is the violence that captures our fear and attention, even though only 20 percent of all homicides are committed by strangers. The other 80 percent are committed by people we know, so I'll focus on those we hire, those we work with, those we fire, those we date, those we marry, those we divorce. — Gavin De Becker

We have too quickly bought into the lie that we'll be happier with more - and as a result, too often miss the joy that comes from owning less. — Joshua Becker

Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it. — Carl Lotus Becker

Still, intuitive assumptions about behavior is only the starting point of systematic analysis, for alone they do not yield many interesting implications. — Gary Becker

He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth. — Ernest Becker

I'm not a God, I make mistakes. — Boris Becker

People use their leaders almost as an excuse. When they give in to the leader's commands they can always reserve the feeling that these commands are are alien to them, that they are the leader's responsibility, that the terrible acts they are committing are in his name and not theirs. This, then, is another thing that makes people feel so guiltless, as Canetti points out: they can imagine themselves as temporary victims of the leader. The more they give in to his spell, and the more terrible the crimes they commit, the more they can feel that the wrongs are not natural to them. It is all so neat, this usage of the leader; it reminds us of James Franzer's discovery that in the remote past tribes often used their kings as scapegoats who, when they no longer served the people's needs, were put to death. These are the many ways in which men can play the hero, all the while that they are avoiding responsibility for their own acts in a cowardly way. — Ernest Becker

I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write. — Ernest Becker

According to Becker's logic, if we're short on cash and happen to drive by a convenience store, we quickly estimate how much money is in the register, consider the likelihood that we might get caught, and imagine what punishment might be in store for us if we are caught (obviously deducting possible time off for good behavior). On the basis of this cost-benefit calculation, we then decide whether it is worth it to rob the place or not. The essence of Becker's theory is that decisions about honesty, like most other decisions, are based on a cost-benefit analysis. — Dan Ariely

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too. — Carl Lotus Becker

We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad. — Ernest Becker

Denial is a save now, pay later scheme. — Gavin De Becker

We called one's lifestyle a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation ... We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. — Ernest Becker

When I was a child, I had posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work and was fascinated by him living on the edge. Looking back, my life was kind of the same. — Boris Becker

Think well to be well. — Jack Becker

Those who are good will qualify themselves. — Gavin De Becker

We all have struggle in our lives. We're all searching for personal freedom, whether we're in a bad place or trying to be true to ourselves. — Barbara Becker Holstein

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 blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. — Ernest Becker

It begins to look as though modern man cannot find his heroism in everyday life any more, as men did in traditional societies just by doing their daily duty of raising children, working, and worshiping. He needs revolutions and wars and "continuing" revolutions to last when the revolutions and wars end. That is the price modern man pays for the eclipse of the sacred dimension. When he dethroned the ideas of soul and God he was thrown back hopelessly on his own resources, on himself and those few around him. Even lovers and families trap and disillusion us because they are not substitutes for absolute transcendence. We might say that they are poor illusions in the sense that we have been discussing. — Ernest Becker

Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next. — Carl Lotus Becker

Women's evolution unfolded through stages in the last 100 years. The first stage was "Wonder Woman," an idealized figure who functioned like — Sylvia Becker-Hill

Threats betray the speaker by proving that he has failed to influence events in any other way. Most often they represent desperation, not intention. — Gavin De Becker

The solution to violence in America is the acceptance of reality — Gavin De Becker

I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life. — Gavin De Becker

Persistent, Mike thought. Mark of those who succeed. Indeed, it was the mark of something, but not success. It was refusing to hear "no," a clear signal of trouble in any context. Forty — Gavin De Becker

This penetrating vocabulary of "initiatory acts," "the infectiousness of the unconflicted person," "priority magic," and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that "father permits it" or "orders it." It is more: the magical heroic transformation of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion. — Ernest Becker

Avoid being in the presence of someone who might do you harm. — Gavin De Becker

People should learn to see and so avoid all danger. Just as a wise man keeps away from mad dogs, so one should not make friends with evil men." - Buddha — Gavin De Becker

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy. — Boris Becker

It was a confusing time in my life, a really bad day at the office. — Boris Becker

I was not sympathetic to the assumption that criminals had radically different motivations from everyone else. — Gary Becker

That's the thing about life. You don't always get a second chance and there are no guarantees. Love is the only thing that really matters. — Linda Becker

The logic of all this seems to be that it is all right for young people in a democracy to learn about any civilization or social theory that is not dangerous, but that they should remain entirely ignorant of any civilization or social theory that might be dangerous on the ground that what you don't know can't hurt you ... a complete denial of the democratic principle that the general diffusion of knowledge and learning through the community is essential to the preservation of free government. — Carl L. Becker

Jesus was not white, hey, he was a black man. Like our pig man, Mzwaki. All the Bible people were dark people. — Jonah Becker

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don't believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times. — Ernest Becker

The institutions of psychiatry, law enforcement, and goverment have proved that no matter what our resources, you cannot reliable control the conduct of CRAZY PEOPLE. It is not fair, but it is so — Gavin De Becker

A small step forward . . .every . . single . . .day. The sun is coming up and I am wondering, 'What wondrous thing shall I witness today? — Liz Becker

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance. - LEO TOLSTOI — Ernest Becker

Throughout history, fairly arbitrary lines drawn on maps have determined who prospers and who needs, who eats and who starves, who attacks and who is attacked, who lives long and who dies young. Oh, we have been slaves to those lines for so long ... — Gavin De Becker

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. — Ernest Becker

Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning
of the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrained
material production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive
evil to have emerged in all of history, and it may even
eventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no "twisted" people
whom we can hold responsible for this. — Ernest Becker

No matter how famous the victim, no matter how powerful the advocates, it simply isn't always possible to control the conduct of other people. — Gavin De Becker

Seven key abilities human beings need to effectively manage life: the ability to motivate ourselves, to persist against frustration, to delay gratification, to regulate moods, to hope, to empathize, and to control impulse. Many — Gavin De Becker

There is more joy to be found in owning less than can ever be found in organizing more. — Joshua Becker

When you remove time," de becker says, "you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction — Malcolm Gladwell