Quotes from Theodore Roszak

Nothing we ever imagined is beyond our powers, only beyond our present self-knowledge.

Data data everywhere but not a thought to think.

The question grows more troubling with each passing year how much of what yesterday's science fiction regarded as unspeakably dreadful has become today's award-winning research

To bemoan the messiness of politics is not just a folly it betrays a dangerous impatience with basic realities. It is like becoming disturbed that people do not fall in love sensibly -- and so deciding to computerize the problem.

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

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.

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.

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.

The art of cinema begins with scraping the chewing gum off the seats.

Good magic opens the mysteries to all; bad magic seeks simply to mystify.

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.

The blood is our strength, for it is the power of the heavens and the Earth within us

Dumnezeu e-n ochi. La fel si Diavolul, de fiecare data cand clipesti.

Meanwhile, as the party ascended to ever dizzier alcoholic altitudes...

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)

Change the prevailing mode of consciousness and you change the world.

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.

Nothing we ever imagined is beyond our powers, only beyond our present self-knowledge.

Ochii sunt portile raiului si iadului.

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.

The building of a good society is not primarily a social, but a psychic task.

The real meaning of revolution is not a change in management … but a change in man.

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.

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.