Theodore Roszak > Quotes

“Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.”
― Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society

“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

“Environmentalists, by and large, are very deeply invested in tactics that have worked to their satisfaction over the last thirty years, namely scaring and shaming people.... I am questioning whether you can go on doing that indefinitely ... [pushing] that same fear-guilt button over and over again. As psychologists will tell you, when a client comes in with an addiction, they are already ashamed. You don't shame them further.”
― Theodore Roszak

“The more people have time to experience the joys of creativity, the less they will be consumers, especially of mass-produced culture. I see that as a kind of new wealth that counts for more than owning material things. I also see art as something people will do rather than consume, and do it as a natural part of their lives; creative endeavors are a form of profound spiritual satisfaction.”
― Theodore Roszak

“The art of cinema begins with scraping the chewing gum off the seats.”
― Theodore Roszak, Flicker

“The blood is our strength, for it is the power of the heavens and the Earth within us”
― Theodore Roszak, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein

“The real meaning of revolution is not a change in management … but a change in man.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“Deprived of bread or the equal benefits of the commonwealth, the person shrivels. Obviously. And that is a clear line to fight on. But when the transcendent energies waste away, then too the person shrivels--though far less obviously. Their loss is suffered in privacy and bewildered silence; it is easily submerged in affluence, entertaining diversions, and adjustive therapy. Well fed and fashionably dressed, surrounded by every manner of mechanical convenience and with our credit rating in good order, we may even be ashamed to feel we have any problem at all.”
― Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends

“We spend our youth hunting for the reality we think lies on the other side of our illusions. What we find at the other end of our search is what lies on the other side of the movie screen: a dark and desolate space that only reveals the unreality of what we pursued. So we spend our adulthood trying to recapture the illusions. Few of us do.”
― Theodore Roszak, Flicker

“Dumnezeu e-n ochi. La fel si Diavolul, de fiecare data cand clipesti.”
― Theodore Roszak, Flicker

“Good magic opens the mysteries to all; bad magic seeks simply to mystify.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“We are nothing if we are not the sum total of our physique and the history of the actions of our physique--that we carry with us in body and in memory. (Body - Michael McClure)”
― Theodore Roszak

“Nothing we ever imagined is beyond our powers, only beyond our present self-knowledge.”
― Theodore Roszak

“La recherche d'une réalité communautaire prend la forme d'une opération de sauvetage massive. J'estime que c'est la grande aventure de notre temps, infiniment plus valable pour l'homme que la conquête de l'espace. Elle représente le retour et le renouveau de l'ancienne gnose. Pour ceux qui répondent à l'appel, ce qui se passe dans le monde des sciences, malgré sa place encore considérable dans le politique gouvernementales, perdra de plus en plus son sens existentiel. À leurs yeux, les scientifiques et leurs nombreux émoules feront figure de clergé archaïque, à la liturgie professionnelle absurde, occupé à échanger ses connaissances, soi-disant à la disposition du public, dans le sanctuaire secret de leur église de l'État.”
― Theodore Roszak

“Ochii sunt portile raiului si iadului.”
― Theodore Roszak, Flicker

“Change the prevailing mode of consciousness and you change the world.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“Meanwhile, as the party ascended to ever dizzier alcoholic altitudes...”
― Theodore Roszak, Flicker

“The building of a good society is not primarily a social, but a psychic task.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“I think, however, the current fascination with the computer and its principal product, information, deserves a more critical response. This is because the computer does so ingeniously mimic human intelligence that it may significantly shake our confidence in the uses of the mind. And it is the mind that must think about all things, including the computer.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking

“[The counterculture] looks to me like all we have to hold against the final consolidation of a technocratic totalitarianism in which we shall find ourselves ingeniously adapted to an existence wholly estranged from everything that has ever made the life of man an interesting adventure.

“If the resistance of the counter culture fails, I think there will be nothing in store for us but what anti-utopians like Huxley and Orwell have forecast–though I have no doubt that these dismal despotisms will be far more stable and effective than their prophets have foreseen. For they will be equipped with techniques of inner-manipulation as unobtrusively fine as gossamer. Above all, the capacity of our emerging technocratic paradise to denature the imagination by appropriating to itself the whole meaning of Reason, Reality, Progress, and Knowledge will render it impossible for men to give any name to their bothersomely unfulfilled potentialities but that of madness. And for such madness, humanitarian therapies will be generously provided. […]

“The question therefore arises: ‘If the technocracy in its grand procession through history is indeed pursuing to the satisfaction of so many such universally ratified values as The Quest for Truth, The Conquest of Nature, The Abundant Society, The Creative Leisure, The Well-Adjusted Life, why not settle back and enjoy the trip?’

“The answer is, I guess, that I find myself unable to see anything at the end of the road we are following with such self-assured momentum but Samuel Beckett’s two sad tramps forever waiting under that wilted tree for their lives to begin. Except that I think the tree isn’t even going to be real, but a plastic counterfeit. In fact, even the tramps may turn out to be automatons . . . though of course there will be great, programmed grins on their faces.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“Dumb as I was about movies at that stage of my life, I had no trouble understanding her response. Vampires. Even I knew that wasn’t art, wasn’t the least bit like the things we came to The Classic to see: movies about tortured relationships, despair, and the meaninglessness of life—like La Strada, The Bicycle Thief, or The Seventh Seal. Really good movies, as I understood it, made you want to go out and drown yourself. Vampire”
― Theodore Roszak, Flicker

“in capitalist society there is an inherent tendency for the attention span of each successive generation to diminish as the experience of alienation increases,”
― Theodore Roszak, Flicker

“The Age of Affluence represents a daring experiment on the part of elites in maintaining their dominance not by starving and bludgeoning their opposition into submission, but by seducing it into compliance. […] totalitarianism is perfected because its techniques become progressively more subliminal. The distinctive feature of the regime of experts lies in the fact that, while possessing ample power to coerce, it prefers to charm conformity from us […] The prime strategy of the technocracy is to level life down to a standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with–and then, on that false and exclusive basis, to claim an intimidating omnicompetence over us by its monopoly of the experts. The business of investing and flourishing treacherous parodies of freedom, joy, and fulfillment becomes an indispensable form of social control under the technocracy.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“The youthful disaffiliation of our time strikes beyond ideology to the level of consciousness, seeking to transform our deepest sense of the self, the other, and the environment.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“In order, then, to root out those distortive assumptions [which enable technocractic control], nothing less is required than the subversion of the scientific world view, with its entrenched commitment to an egocentric and cerebral mode of consciousness [what Roszak calls the “myth of objective consciousness”]. In its place, there must be a new culture in which the non-intellective capacities of the personality–those capacities that take fire from visionary splendor and the experience of human communion–become the arbiters of the good, the true, and the beautiful.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“Nothing we come upon in the world can any longer speak to us in its own rights … [They] have been deprived of the voice with which they once declared their mystery to men.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“So subtle and so well rationalized have the arts of technocratic domination become in our advanced industrial societies that even those in the state and/or corporate structure who dominate our lives must find it impossible to conceive of themselves as the agents of totalitarian control. Rather, they easily see themselves as the conscientious managers of a munificent social system.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

“The prime strategy of the technocracy “is to level life down to a standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with—and then, on that false and exclusive basis, to claim an intimidating omnicompetence over us by its monopoly of the experts.”
― Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition