John Gray: Trending quotes

“For Freud, the pursuit of happiness is a distraction from living. It would be better to aim for something different -- a type of life in which you do not need a fantasy of satisfaction in order to find being human an interesting and worthwhile experience… Human beings are more likely to find ways of living well if they do not spend their lives aiming to be happy.”

John Gray

Source: The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“we are unique individuals with unique experiences”

John Gray

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

“The basis of science is the empirical method, which uses the senses to build up a picture of the world; but science tells us that our senses have evolved to help us get by, not to show us the world as it is. Science is only a systematic examination of our impressions, and in the end all each of us has left are our own sensations … The end-result of the empirical method, then, is that each individual is left alone with their own experiences. We can escape this solitude, Balfour suggested, only if we accept that there is a divine mind.”

John Gray

Cross-correspondences (p. 69-70)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

World , Sense , Solitude , Science

“Atheists say they want a secular world, but a world defined by the absence of the Christians' god is still a Christian world. Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Unsaved: Atheism, the Last Consequence of Christianity (p.126)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

God , World

“Blair has been the modern man he claims to be: for him, a sense of subjective certainty is all that is needed for an action to be right. If deception is needed to realise the providential design, it cannot be truly deceitful.”

John Gray

"Neoconned!: How Blair took New Labour for a ride," http://web.archive.org/web/20090404081217/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/neoconned-how-blair-took-new-labour-for-a-ride-454209.html The Independent (2007-06-22)

Sense

“The repression of liberty that took place in the countries in which Communist regimes were established cannot be adequately explained as a product of backwardness, or of errors in the application of Marxian theory. It was the result of a resolute attempt to realize an Enlightenment utopia - a condition of society in which no serious form of conflict any longer exists.”

John Gray

'Isaiah Berlin: The Value of Decency' (p.99)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Error , Country

“A high-tech Green utopia, in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life, is scientifically feasible; but it is humanly unimaginable. If anything like it ever comes about, it will not be through the will of homo rapiens.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: Yet another utopia (p. 184)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life

“Today those who peer into the future want only relief from anxiety. Unable to face the prospect that the cycles of war will continue, they are desperate to find a pattern of improvement in history. It is only natural that believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt, should turn to the sorcery of numbers. Happily there are some who are ready to assist them. Just as the Elizabethan magus transcribed tables shown to him by angels, the modern scientific scryer deciphers numerical auguries of angels hidden in ourselves.”

John Gray

In the Puppet Theatre: Dark mirrors, Hidden Angels and an Algorithmic Prayer-Wheel (p. 99)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

War , Faith , Angels , History

“With new technologies of surveillance, economies of scale overcome problems of cost. Since all their electronic communications can be accessed, it is no longer necessary to segregate the inmates from one another. As there is no outside world, escape becomes unimaginable. Technological progress has brought into being a system of surveillance more far-reaching than any Bentham could have conceived. Enclosing the entire population in a virtual Panopticon might seem the ultimate invasion of freedom. But universal confinement need not be experienced as a privation. If they know nothing else, most are likely to accept it as normal. If the technology through which surveillance operates also provides continuous entertainment, they may soon find any other way of living intolerable.”

John Gray

In the Puppet Theatre: A Universal Panopticon (p. 125)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

World , Way , Communication , Problem

“The truth that Dostoevsky puts in the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor is that humankind has never sought freedom, and never will. The secular religions of modern times tell us that humans yearn to be free; and it is true that they find restraint of any kind irksome. Yet it is rare that individuals value their freedom more than the comfort that comes with servility, and rarer still for whole peoples to do so.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Unsaved: The Grand Inquisitor and Flying Fish (p. 123)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

People , Truth , Religion , Freedom

“Theories of modernisation are cod-scientific projections of Enlightenment values. They tell us nothing about the future. But they do help us to understand the present. They show the lingering power of the Christian faith that history is a moral drama, a tale of progress or redemption, in which - despite everything we know of it - morality rules the world.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: The myth of modernisation (p. 174)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World , Faith , History , Understanding

“In the life of the academic mind, the owl of Minerva seldom flies as early as the dusk.”

John Gray

'Definition of the Political Thought of Tlön' (p.91)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Life

“The practical effects of the Marxian-Federovian cult of technology were ruinous. Inspired by a materialist philosophy, the Soviet Union inflicted more far-reaching and lasting damage on the material environment than any regime in history. Green earth became desert, and pollution rose to life-threatening levels. No advantage to mankind was gained by the Soviet destruction of nature. Soviet citizens lived no longer than people in other countries - many of them a good deal less.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Unsaved: Nikolai Federov, Bolshevism and the Technological Pursuit of Immortality (p. 138)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life , People , History , Nature

“Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth - and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Truth and consequences (p. 26)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Truth , Faith , Nature , Science

“The mass of mankind is ruled not by its intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Green Humanism (p. 17)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot.”

John Gray

A shattering moment in America's fall from power (2008)

War , Communication , Country

“Jesus promised the resurrection of the body, not an afterlife as a disembodied consciousness. Despite this, the followers of Jesus have always disparaged the flesh. Their belief that humans are marked off from the rest of creation by having an immortal soul has led them to disown the fate they share with other animals. They cannot reconcile their attachment to the body with their hope of immortality. When the two come into conflict it is always the flesh that is left behind.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Unsaved: Gnosticism and the cybernauts
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Fate , Hope , Soul , Animals

“If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.”

John Gray

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 75)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Life , Nature , Knowledge , Learning

“In a traditional reading eating the apple was the original sin; but, as Gnostics understood the story, the two primordial humans were right to eat the apple. The God that commanded them not to do so was not the true God but only a demiurge, a tyrannical underling exulting in its power, while the serpent came to free them from slavery. True, when they ate the apple Adam and Eve fell from grace. This was indeed the Fall of Man – a fall into the dim world of everyday consciousness. But the Fall need not be final. Having eaten its fill from the Tree of Knowledge, humankind can then rise into a state of conscious innocence. When this happens, Herr C. declares, it will be ‘the final chapter in the history of the world.”

John Gray

The Faith of Puppets: The Freedom of the Marionette (p. 8)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

God , World , History , Knowledge

“In any case, only someone miraculously innocent of history could believe that competition among ideas could result in the triumph of truth. Certainly ideas compete with one another, but the winners are normally those with power and human folly on their side. When the medieval Church exterminated the Cathars, did Catholic memes prevail over the memes of heretics? If the Final Solution had been carried to a conclusion, would that have demonstrated the inferiority of Hebrew memes?”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Truth and Consequences (p. 26-7)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Truth , History , Idea