Great Throughts Treasury

"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 macho is in the metaphors, not the phenomena."

"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."

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

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

"To begin with we're dealing with problems that are urgent and life threatening and threatening the lives of other species beyond our own. You simply have to say that if it's true, it's true. Now in many cases we're not sure that it's true. We're troubled perhaps because of the uncertainty of the problem and we have to invoke prudence more than certainty in the matter. But in addition to that, even if the problem is an urgent one, you still at some point, I feel, connect with something more positive and affirmative in people. And I believe it's there. I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't believe it was there. So my article of faith is that at a very deep level the human psyche is grafted to the planet out of which we evolve, that there is what I call an ecological unconscious. Now whenever we invoke the unconscious, the depths of the unconscious, what we're essentially doing is pursuing a philosophical discussion of human nature. We're asking what makes people tick, what are the foundations of human behavior? And there's been of course a lot of speculation about that throughout psychiatric tradition. Some people find sexuality there, others find the archetypes of the high religious traditions there. I'm suggesting that at a certain level of the unconscious mind, what we find is ecological wisdom. And indeed, if that were not there, our species could not have survived and evolved as it has. Exactly what the ecological unconscious is and how it asserts itself and makes itself known, that's perhaps yet to be discovered once we attend to the problem. But I have floated this phrase, suggested this phrase as a hypothesis-- that at the lowest level, the deepest of the unconscious mind, we find a ecological unconscious deeper down even than Freud's ideas about sexuality or Jung's ideas about religious archetypes It's something that connects us intimately, companionably with the flora and fauna, mountains, rivers, the natural world around us."

"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."

"The youths comprised a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society, that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."