39 quotes
In the life of the academic mind, the owl of Minerva seldom flies as early as the dusk.
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)
The evil of totalitarianism is not only that it fails to protect specific liberties but that it extinguishes the very possibility of freedom.
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)
It is rare that individuals value their freedom more than the comfort that comes with servility.
If you want to understand the beliefs that are shaping global politics, read the Book of Revelation.
The result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing.
The British state has defaulted on its core functions while attempting to remake society.
Near-ubiquitous technological monitoring is a consequence of the decline of cohesive societies that has occurred alongside the rising demand for individual freedom.
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)
Humans kill one another – and in some cases themselves – for many reasons, but none is more human than the attempt to make sense of their lives. More than the loss of life, they fear loss of meaning.
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)
There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized. There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)
Progress in civilization seems possible only in interludes when history is idling.
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)
It is because human needs are contradictory that no human life can be perfect. That does not mean that human life is imperfect. It means that the idea of perfection has no meaning.
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)
With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as “Enlightenment values”. But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed.
The belief that there is some hidden cabal directing the course of events is a type of anthropomorphism – a way of finding agency in the entropy of history.
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)
Cheating ageing by a low-calorie diet, uploading one’s mind into a super-computer, migrating into outer space … Longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)
I may not be as unambiguously hostile to capitalism as many people are, but what I don't like about it is the commodification of personal experiences, it turns everyone into actors.
Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same. Scientific inquiry may be an embodiment of reason, but what such inquiry demonstrates is that humans are not rational animals. The fact that humanists refuse to accept the demonstration only confirms its truth.
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)
Echoing the Christian faith in free will, humanists hold that human beings are – or may someday become – free to choose their lives. They forget that the self that does the choosing has not itself been chosen.
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)
Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world.
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)
The true goal of the bourgeois life, in other words, is not self-enactment, but diversion. Most people need the organised distraction of work (if they can find it). Idleness - the life of the playboy who doesn't answer the phone - is simply too demanding.
Tyranny offers relief from the burden of sanity and a licence to enact forbidden impulses of hatred and violence. By acting on these impulses and releasing them in their subjects tyrants give people a kind of happiness, which as individuals they may be incapable of achieving.
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)