Theodore Roszak Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

If God has at last died in our culture, he has not been buried. For the casually religious, he lingers on like a fond old relative who has been so expertly embalmed that we may prop him up in the far corner of the living room and pretend the old fellow is still with us.

Theodore Roszak
Without apoptosis, life would not be possible.... when cells lose their ability to die, they run rampant, assuming that life-threatening form we call cancer.... The process of apoptosis by which life and development are governed is profoundly communal.... Cells... need to be "encouraged" to live.

Theodore Roszak
Boyle was among the first who recognized that the withdrawal of sympathy licenses conduct that would not be permissible within an animistic vision of nature.... The vision that he and his scientific colleagues were creating was fast becoming a mathematical abstraction lacking color, odor, texture, and personality.... The task of the natural philosopher, we are told, is to "probe," "penetrate," and "pierce" nature in all her "mysterious," secret," and "intimate recesses."

Theodore Roszak
Because girls are raised to specialize in a certain set of human characteristics, would they not, then, bring to science a different sensibility? Does that sensibility have the right to be represented in science—or, for that matter, in business, politics, law, or medicine?

Theodore Roszak
When theoretical physicists censor the public's spontaneous visualizing response by warning us we must not try to picture the underlying nature of the world, whether atoms or quarks or preons, they are drawing upon an intellectual discipline devised by Calvin. Reality is beyond the senses; only the rigorously logical mind, leaping bravely into the intangible, can grasp it. No images.

Theodore Roszak
The truth of the matter is no society, not even our severely secularized technocracy, can ever dispense with mystery and magical ritual.

Theodore Roszak
Goethe wondered at what point our instruments might be creating what we think we see out there in the world.... his question is still a good one. Every science of observation must take care not to get lost among its own artifacts.

Theodore Roszak