John N. Gray Quotes

#1. What is so admirable in being ruled by a need for peace of mind ?

John N. Gray

#2. From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.

John N. Gray

#3. Polytheism is too delicate a way of thinking for modern minds.

John N. Gray

#4. It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to a normal madness.

John N. Gray

#5. Everything that exists is a type of matter, he believed, including what we call the soul. We are reluctant to give up the distinction between matter and mind because we cannot imagine matter thinking. But, for Leopardi, the fact that we think shows that matter thinks:

John N. Gray

#6. Today we have made a fetish of choice; but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life.

John N. Gray

#7. Books can inspire you to love yourself more, but by listening to, writing out, or verbally expressing your feelings you are actually doing it.

John N. Gray

#8. In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.

John N. Gray

#9. Even in the latter case nature exhibits a kind of intelligence, and there is no reason to rule out the possibility that machines will do so too. If nature in the form of the human species could bring forth intelligent machines, the process of evolution would continue among the machines.

John N. Gray

#10. humankind's presence on Earth is nothing but a cancer

John N. Gray

#11. The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the sings of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing.

John N. Gray

#12. It is not what we say that hurts but how we say it.

John N. Gray

#13. More than Christianity, the religion of Victorian times was a belief in human advance - the conviction that freed from ignorance and superstition, humanity could expand its power and be master of its destiny.

John N. Gray

#14. Human knowledge is one thing, human wellbeing another. There is no predetermined harmony between the two. The examined life may not be worth living.

John N. Gray

#15. Alone among the animals, humans seek meaning in their lives by killing and dying for the sake of nonsensical dreams.

John N. Gray

#16. Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.

The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

John N. Gray

#17. We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do. The stories we tell ourselves are like the messages that appear on Ouija boards. If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect.

John N. Gray

#18. No one questioned the Machine's powers. Religion had been re-established with the Machine as the Supreme Being. Everyone yielded to 'some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible.

John N. Gray

#19. To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.

John N. Gray

#20. Ordinary language was a form of life that needed - and permitted - nothing beyond itself. Humans were figures in a world they had themselves made.

John N. Gray

#21. It came to be believed that society could be understood using the same methods that are used to understand machines, and from there it was a small step to think that society is in fact a kind of machine.

John N. Gray

#22. Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?

John N. Gray

#23. Life was indeed cruel; but it was better to glorify the Will than deny it.

John N. Gray

#24. Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on.

John N. Gray

#25. Just as a man is fulfilled through working out the intricate details of solving a problem, a woman is fulfilled through talking about the details of her problems.

John N. Gray

#26. Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest

John N. Gray

#27. 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.

John N. Gray

#28. Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them.
In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.

John N. Gray

#29. Dickens enjoyed human beings as he found them, unregenerate, peculiar and incorrigibly themselves.

John N. Gray

#30. Philosophy has been a masked ball in which a religious image of humankind is renewed in the guise humanist ideas of progress and enlightenment. Even philosophy's greatest unmaskers have ended up as figures in the masquerade. Removing the masks from our animal faces is a task that has hardly begun.

John N. Gray