Theodore Roszak - Life Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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 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
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