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“I sense a dark foreboding in man’s separation from his body, as if it heralded the severing of man’s direct link to nature’s laws. This is not a minor issue: it’s about whether man is a human being or a machine. This question is related to even more profound matters â€� in fact, the most serious matters of all. The most crucial question regarding every human action in this era is how much strain it exercises on nature: the choice is between growth and preservation. This increasing lack of physical exercise does not bode well. The replacement of muscle power with industrial energy means, of course, a great increase of burden, the fiasco of all fiascos.”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“The guardian of life, however, does not derive all of his power and assuredness from reasoning and logic. The basic principle of life protection, the conservation of the Earth’s life as a lush and diverse whole, is also perceived as being sacred: as something incomparably holier than anything man might regard as such (not that in this age of cynical despair much holiness is left!).”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“The biologist, who sees man as a balanced whole, and for whom muscles, bones, sinews and veins are as important as brains, can only look on, upset, as the destruction of all physical work and fitness continues. When Martti Ahtisaari entered the arena of Finnish politics, my biologist friend Olavi Hildén â€� a university professor over sixty yet still in great shape â€� became furious: “How could people even consider to choose him as our president? He can’t even walk properly: he just ambles along!â€�
If one has the patience to cool down, he will admit that charming personalities exist even among chubby people: many great things have been achieved from behind thick layers of fat. But still, it is frightening to see the presidential chair filled by someone who has completely allowed his willpower and discipline to slacken in one sphere of life. This is all the more unpleasant if we follow sociologists in believing that presidential victories are no longer determined by candidatesâ€� ideals, but rather by the images of themselves that they project. Is the popularity of Ahtisaari due to the fact that he is perceived as a buddy by the typical Finnish male, feasting on beer and and sausages in his sauna, and that he reminds the typical Finnish female of her own pot-bellied companion?”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“Every individual who walks, runs, rides bikes, swims, rows, paddles, skis, shovels or hoes is setting up a line of defence against the mad onslaught of machines; if he is a parent, grandparent, teacher, youth mentor or exercise instructor who also manages to win a few other people over to his side, he is doing an even better job.”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“Faith in technology has absolutely nothing to do with reason or wisdom: it is religion â€� an insensible, uncritical, unquestionable religion. Technology is the foundation of the most anti-intellectual and religious culture Western civilisation, or indeed the world, has ever known. The two religions at Sääksmäki, however, offer an interesting contrast: the Church nowadays, whatever its faults, is gentle, understanding and preserving; the religion of technology, on the other hand, is aggressive and destructive.”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“Finnish agriculture is so dully over-mechanised that it defies all statistics and diagrams. Every village in Finland, far from being an embodiment of farming and the rural way of life, reminds one of a technological exposition, whereas serenity and the values of tradition are still visible in the countryside of all other European countries. Finland â€� at least a few years ago â€� was the world leader of electronic financial transfers. Ideas about electronic systems and computers enter our silly heads like knives cut through butter. Personally, those who feel so important and busy that they couldn’t survive without mobile phones in their cars, I would send to the mountains for a year, or rather five years, for them to reflect on the values of life. But perhaps that wouldn’t help either: if a mind is dull, it’ll stay dull.”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“The real problem is posed by those countrymen who are complete slaves to machines from a shockingly young age. All exceptions aside, it is impossible to make the average Finnish country dweller of over fifteen years of age ride a bicycle, ski or row â€� or even exercise in the fields. The spell of the car and its antecedent â€� the scooter â€� is unbelievable. A young man will travel a hundred metres to the sauna by car; as this involves backing the car, reversing and manoeuvring, opening and shutting garage doors, it is not a matter of saving time. In the case of farmers, moreover, the more technology advances â€� every sack of fertiliser now being lifted by a tractor, the spread and removal of manure being a mechanical feat â€� the more will their physical activities be limited to taking a few steps in the garden and climbing onto the benches of saunas. Lumberjacks have already been replaced by multi-tasking machines, while fishermen lever their trawl sacks with a winch, haul their nets with a lever, and gather their Baltic herrings with an aspirator from open fish traps.”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“Machines, however, were already looming upon us and were soon destined to strike at the heart of the wilderness â€� and elsewhere as well â€� depriving man of all he deserved: mighty labour, effort and struggle.”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“In a world where the keywords for salvation are stop, return and regress, old people are extremely valuable. Man has been formed in such a way that the little wisdom that certain individuals possess tends to gradually accumulate in the course of the years. One of the insanities perpetuated by the frenzied times we are living in is the trivialisation and marginalisation of the elderly. Only a small percentage of elderly people suffers from illnesses leading to dementia: most people are certainly wiser at the age of ninety than they are at that of eighty-nine. The young human being will always be an unripe fruit and crude specimen: both wisdom and sense of responsibility tend to develop in one’s old age (if they were ever there in the first place, that is), while irrelevancies fade away. If the minimum age requirement for all the decision makers of mankind were, say, eighty, much would already have been achieved. Many harmful delusions would have been avoided, and destruction would now be advancing at a far slower pace.”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?