Theodore Roszak Quotes (43 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Flicker

Theodore Roszak

Theodore Roszak: 43 quotes 9 likes

Famous Theodore Roszak Quotes

“It tells us the world is… deserving of reverence.”

Theodore Roszak

with Betty Roszak, "Deep Form in Art and Nature" Alexandria 4, Vol.4 The Order of Beauty and Nature (1997) ed. David Fideler
Context: 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.

“That is what Castle's work needed: a beginner's eye”

Theodore Roszak book Flicker

Flicker (1991)
Context: 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.

“The joy of this quest is not in triumph over others, but in the search for the qualities we share with them and for our uniqueness, which raises us above all competition.”

Theodore Roszak

Quoted in The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson, (1980)

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.7 The Rape of Nature

“It is characteristic of the technocracy to render itself invisible.”

Theodore Roszak

Its assumptions about reality and its values become as unobtrusively pervasive as the air we breathe. ...the technocracy increases and consolidates its power... following the dictates of industrial efficiency, rationality, and necessity. ...the technocracy assumes a position similar to that of the purely neutral umpire in an athletic contest. ...we tend to ignore the man ...Yet ...he alone sets the limits and goals of the competition and judges the contenders.

“The process of apoptosis by which life and development are governed is profoundly communal. …Cells …need to be "encouraged" to live.”

Theodore Roszak

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.9 Deep Community
Context: 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 Quotes about life

“It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.”

Theodore Roszak

“In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the nontechnical man. Instead, the scale of intricacy or all human activities… transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts. …even the most seemingly personal aspects of life. …In the absence of expertise, the great [productive} mechanism would surely break down, leaving us in the midst of chaos and poverty.”

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

The Making of an Elder Culture (2009)
Context: 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.

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.9 Deep Community

“Without apoptosis, life would not be possible.”

Theodore Roszak

...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.
Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.9 Deep Community

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

Theodore Roszak

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.7 The Rape of Nature

Theodore Roszak Quotes about the world

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.10 The Black Madonna

“The elder culture that is being improvised all around us day by day… promises to be the road toward a saner, more compassionate, more sustainable world—altogether, a more important turning point than ever presented itself in the 1960s… This, at last, is what the dissenting idealism of the 1960s was, in its highest and brightest expression, all about: a transformation of values that may finally reveal the goal of industrialization… In raising that possibility I cling to one hope. They grew up… reveling in their willingness to search beyond the limits of convention. …What Boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity… we have won years back from death. That gives us the grand project of using those extra years to build a culture that is morally remarkable.”

Theodore Roszak

The Making of an Elder Culture (2009)

“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

The Making of the Counter Culture (1969)

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.7 The Rape of Nature

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.11 Only Connect

“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

The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (2001)

Theodore Roszak Quotes

“Women enter the sciences, but "womanliness"—those qualities that have always been stereotypically attributed to females—is not yet entirely welcome”

Theodore Roszak

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.11 Only Connect
Context: 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.

Women , Science

“It now requires such artful speculation to maintain an orthodox faith in chance. Skeptics, it would seem, are willing to believe anything.”

Theodore Roszak

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.9 Deep Community
Context: 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.

Faith , Art , Chance

“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.”

Theodore Roszak

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.7 The Rape of Nature
Context: 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?

Science , Wealth

“If we could assume the view of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness.”

Theodore Roszak

The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (2001)
Context: 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.

Behavior , Nature , Madness

“Or perhaps… there is actually an infinity of universes”

Theodore Roszak

Universe

“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

The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
Context: 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.

Afterword: The Idols of the Bedchamber

World , Reality

“Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.”

Theodore Roszak

Source: Where the Wasteland Ends

Nature

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.11 Only Connect

Law , Girl , Business , Science

“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

The Making of an Elder Culture (2009)

People

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.10 The Black Madonna

Imagination , Nature

“It is characteristic of the technocracy to render itself invisible. Its assumptions about reality and its values become as unobtrusively pervasive as the air we breathe…. the technocracy increases and consolidates its power… following the dictates of industrial efficiency, rationality, and necessity…. the technocracy assumes a position similar to that of the purely neutral umpire in an athletic contest…. we tend to ignore the man… Yet… he alone sets the limits and goals of the competition and judges the contenders.”

Theodore Roszak

Reality

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

Theodore Roszak

The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (2001)

Lie , Home , Time

“The macho is in the metaphors, not the phenomena.”

Theodore Roszak

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.9 Deep Community

“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

The Making of an Elder Culture (2009)

Love , People , Hope , Music

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.9 Deep Community

Universe , Selfishness

“"Technocracy," in The Meaning of Technology. Selected Readings from American Sources (2004) ed. Montserrat Ginés Giber”

Theodore Roszak

Variant: "Technocracy," in The Meaning of Technology. Selected Readings from American Sources (2004) ed. Montserrat Ginés Giber

Reading

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

Theodore Roszak

The Making of the Counter Culture (1969)

Truth

“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

with Betty Roszak, "Deep Form in Art and Nature" Alexandria 4, Vol.4 The Order of Beauty and Nature (1997) ed. David Fideler

Books , Beauty , Hope , Learning

“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 Making of an Elder Culture (2009)

Life , Wisdom , Age , Future

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.7 The Rape of Nature

Life , Men , World , Way

“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 Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (2001)

Life , Personality , Cry

“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

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.7 The Rape of Nature

Fear , Nature , Anger

“We are discovering that natural philosophy needs bonds of sympathy as well as precision of intellect.”

Theodore Roszak

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.11 Only Connect

Nature

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

Theodore Roszak

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.11 Only Connect

Beauty

“It will be enough to define the technocracy as that society in which those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge. And beyond the authority of science, there is no appeal.”

Theodore Roszak

Knowledge , Science

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