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John Gray citations

John N. Gray, né le 17 avril 1948 à South Shields dans le comté de Tyne and Wear , est un philosophe et essayiste britannique. Ancien titulaire de la chaire de philosophie européenne à la London School of Economics, il se consacre désormais à l'écriture.

John Gray contribue régulièrement au Guardian, au New Statesman et au supplément littéraire du Times. Il a écrit de nombreux livres de théorie politique, dont récemment Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals où il se montre particulièrement critique de la pensée humaniste qu'il considère comme la mère des idéologies religieuses. Gray estime que la libre volonté, et donc la moralité, sont illusoires ; l'humanité, pour Gray, n'est jamais qu'une espèce animale qui a érigé la conquête des autres formes de vie en principe, détruisant par là son environnement naturel. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. avril 1948   •   Autres noms John Gray, John Gray (philosopher)
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John Gray: 164   citations 0   J'aime

John Gray: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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John Gray

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

“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.”

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John Gray

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

“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.”

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John Gray livre 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)

“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.”

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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)

“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.”

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John Gray

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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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)

“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.”

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John Gray

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

“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.”

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John Gray livre 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)

“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.”

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John Gray livre 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)

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

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John Gray

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

“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.”

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John Gray livre 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)

“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.”

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

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

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

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John Gray livre 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.”

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John Gray

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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John Gray

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

“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.”

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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)

“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?”

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John Gray livre 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)

“Hayek watched the interwar collapse with horror, as Keynes did, and shared many of Keynes’s liberal values. What he failed to understand is that these values cannot be renewed by applying any formula or doctrine, or by trying to construct an ideal liberal regime in which freedom is insulated from the contingencies of politics.”

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John Gray

The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right - and wrong (2015)

“Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?”

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

As It Is: Simply To See (p.199)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“Gamblers wager for the sake of playing. Among those who fish for pleasure, the best fisherman is not the one who catches the most fish but the one who enjoys fishing the most. The point of playing is that the play has no point.”

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

As It Is: Playing With Fate (p. 196)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“The most important feature of natural selection is that it is a process of drift. Evolution has no end-point or direction, so if the development of society is an evolutionary process it is one that is going nowhere.”

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John Gray

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 78)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

“As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But – as the Genesis myth also teaches – there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.”

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John Gray

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (pp. 79-80)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

“If Darwin's discovery had been made in a Taoist or Shinto, Hindu or animist culture it would very likely have become just one more strand in its intertwining mythologies. In these faiths humans and other animals are kin. By contrast, arising among Christians who set humans beyond all other living things, it triggered a bitter controversy that rages on to this day.”

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

The Human: Science versus Humanism (p. 3-4)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“Christianity struck at the root of pagan tolerance of illusion. In claiming that there is only one true faith, it gave truth a supreme value it had not had before. It also made disbelief in the divine possible for the first time. The long-delayed consequence of Christian faith was an idolatry of truth that found its most complete expression in atheism. If we live in a world without gods, we have Christianity to thank for it.”

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

Atheism, the last consequence of Christianit (p. 127)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“The belief in unity that has fuelled so many utopian dreams is an effort to reconcile the irreconcilable that ends in repression. Berlin suggests we renounce this venerable faith, and learn how to live with intractable conflict.”

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John Gray

'Isaiah Berlin: The Value of Decency' (p.106-7)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

“A 'postmodern' organisation serving 'premodern' values, Al Qaeda has planted a question mark over the very idea of what it means to be modern.”

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

Non-Progress: Al Qaeda (p. 176)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.”

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

The Human: Disseminated Primatemaia (p. 7)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

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