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Quotes from The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths — John Gray

born 1948 England

← All quotes by John Gray

7 quotes

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)

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)

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)

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.

The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Attribution

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