Theodore Roszak Quotes

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?

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

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.

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.

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."

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.