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Quotes from Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings — John Gray

born 1948 England

← All quotes by John Gray

8 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 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)

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.

Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

There is no more consensus on what justice means than there is on the character of the good. If anything, there is less. Among the virtues, justice is one of the most shaped by convention. For that reason it is among the most changeable.

Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

The idea of politics as a conservation in which the collision of opinions is moderated and accommodated, in which what is sought is not truth but peace, has been almost entirely lost, and supplanted by a legalist paradigm in which all political claims and conflicts are modelled in the jargon of rights.

Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

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.

Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Like other human freedoms, the freedoms embodied in market institutions are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do this they can reasonably be altered. This is true not only of the rights that are involved in market institutions. It is true of all human rights.

Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Gray (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.