Theodore Roszak Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

Ideology is not absent in the technocracy... it is simply invisible, having blended into the supposedly indisputable truth of the scientific world view.... The most effective ideologies are always those that are congruent with the limits of consciousness, for then they work subliminally.

Theodore Roszak
Here, at the birth of modern science, is a fundamental insight. Our knowledge of nature Out There begins with knowledge of ourselves In Here. Until we have freed our minds and emotions of the hidden presuppositions that stand between us and the world, we can never be certain we are in touch with reality.

Theodore Roszak
Science, in broad outline, can be divided into three parts: the study of the vast, the study of the tiny, and the study of life which... acts as audience to both the vast and the tiny.

Theodore Roszak
There are dragons buried beneath our cities, primordial energies greater than the power of our bombs. Two thousand years of Judeo-Christian soul-shaping and three centuries of crusading scientific intellect have gone into their interment... But now they wake and stir.

Theodore Roszak
Women enter the sciences, but "womanliness"—those qualities that have always been stereotypically attributed to females—is not yet entirely welcome, whether it comes into the laboratory wearing pants or a skirt.

Theodore Roszak
When it is another human being who is being... objectified, everybody (except the rapist) can clearly see the act as a crime. But when we objectify the natural world, turning it into a dead or stupid thing, we have another word for that. Science.

Theodore Roszak
Since the late 19th century, aging has been the normal state of all industrial societies; it is a sustained trend. Societies designed to cater to the needs of aging populations will soon become the accepted political condition of our species. Acknowledging that fact will, at some point, slide so smoothly into the conventional wisdom that future generations may not realize that this is a major new feature of modern life, this is different, this is not what human culture was ever meant to be—and it all started now.

Theodore Roszak
The epidemic psychosis of our time is the lie of believing we have no ethical obligation to our planetary home.

Theodore Roszak
The alchemists of the ancient world had a teaching: "As above, so below." Four words that contain an entire cosmology.... a grand cosmic unity, a harmony resounding in the mind of God.

Theodore Roszak
This is the point at which the "rape of nature" ceases to be a metaphor. It is an accurate depiction... rape stems from a compulsive need to control, to control completely.... From... inadequacy flow fear, anger, the need to punish and subjugate.... the objective is... to dominate this elusive, troubling female so that she will do what she is ordered to do.... that requires the objectification of the other; she must become what he wants her to become.

Theodore Roszak
That is what Castle's work needed: a beginner's eye—my eye, before it became too schooled and guarded, while it was still in touch with the vulgar foundations of the art, still vulnerably naive enough to receive that faint and flickering revelation of the dark god whose scriptures are the secret history of the movies.

Theodore Roszak
Some Calvinist divines identified an "idol" as anything "feigned in the mind by imagination." There is a haunting similarity between such teachings and Galileo's bold attack upon what he called "secondary qualities" in nature.

Theodore Roszak
The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free each of us to become the complete person that we were meant to be.

Theodore Roszak
You and I, whole human beings, are, so Richard Dawkins insists, merely "survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." At its most fundamental level, he finds the living universe populated by John Wayne genetics and Clint Eastwood chemicals.

Theodore Roszak
The final stage of life... offers us the opportunity to detach from competitive, high-consumption priorities... At that point, life itself—the opportunity it offers for growth, for intellectual adventure, for the simple joys of love and companionship, for working out our salvation—comes to be seen as our highest value.... That is what I have always assumed it means to be countercultural.

Theodore Roszak
All the while, steadily and without fanfare and as invincibly as all things blossom, ripen, and mature, more people were living longer. And as they did so, they were creating a possibility not even the most far-sighted futurist had anticipated.

Theodore Roszak
Science uses the senses but does not enjoy them; finally buries them under theory, abstraction, mathematical generalization

Theodore Roszak
If a problem does not have a technical solution, it must not be a real problem. It is but an illusion... a figment born of some regressive cultural tendency.

Theodore Roszak
Science rests itself not in the world the scientist beholds at any particular point in time, but in his mode of viewing that world. A man is a scientist not because of what he sees, but because of how he sees it.

Theodore Roszak
Our goal should not be to borrow from elsewhere, but to search among our own cultural resources, perhaps even in modern science and industrialism, for ways to restore art to the status it has always held in traditional societies as a form of knowledge.... art adds to what we learn from any combination of physics, biology, geology, and chemistry. It tells us the world is... deserving of reverence.

Theodore Roszak
The bond of sympathy, like the artist's eye for beauty, may stretch across many divisions.

Theodore Roszak
In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is to fill a book, a gallery, or a theater with joy, hope, and beauty.

Theodore Roszak
In four centuries of taking wealth and comfort from the body of the Earth, modern science has not troubled to produce a single rite or ritual, not even a minor prayer, that asks pardon or gives thanks. But then what sense would it make to ask anything of a dead body?

Theodore Roszak
Reduced to the statistical permutations of genes, life became "nothing but" the marriage of chance and selection.

Theodore Roszak
Technological optimism is the snake oil of urban-industrialism.

Theodore Roszak
Or perhaps... there is actually an infinity of universes among which only this one has by sheer accident produced the conditions for life and mind. It now requires such artful speculation to maintain an orthodox faith in chance. Skeptics, it would seem, are willing to believe anything.

Theodore Roszak
We are discovering that natural philosophy needs bonds of sympathy as well as precision of intellect.

Theodore Roszak
My hope is that people who grew up on J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the folk music of Pete Seeger, the protest ballads of Country Joe, the anarchic insolence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the biting satire of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, the acid rock of Bob Dylan, the sociology of Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse, the Summer of Love and the Days of Rage, will not be content to spend their retirement years on cruise ships or feeding their Social Security checks into slot machines at the nearest casino.

Theodore Roszak
If we could assume the view of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness. But as the prevailing reality principle would have it, nothing could be greater madness than to believe that beast and plant, mountain and river have a "point of view." …minds exist, so we believe, nowhere but in human heads.

Theodore Roszak
Life... becomes an anomalous puzzle that cannot be "explained" until scientists in laboratories find a way to animate the dead matter that is the normal condition of things. This amounts to saying that life has no "place" in the world until men—the gender that originally dominated the world and still does—can create it... in a laboratory and express it in a formula. Only then will we "understand" what life is.

Theodore Roszak