"The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man."
--Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"The violence in the world comes about because we human beings are forever creating barriers between men who are like us and men who are not like us."
--Edmund Leach, A Runaway World

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
--Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism