5
" The highly civilized apes swung gracefully from bough to bough; the Neanderthaler was uncouth and bound to the earth. The apes, saturated and playful, lived in sophisticated playfulness, or caught fleas in philosophic contemplation; the Neanderthaler trampled gloomily through the world, banging around with clubs. The apes looked down on him amusedly from their tree tops and threw nuts at him. Sometimes horror seized them: they ate fruits and tender plants with delicate refinement; the Neanderthaler devoured raw meat, he slaughtered animals and his fellows. He cut down trees that had always stood, moved rocks from their time-hallowed place, transgressed every law and tradition of the jungle. He was uncouth, cruel, without animal dignity – from the point of view of the highly civilized apes, a barbaric relapse of history. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon "
― John N. Gray , The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
17
" we feel with terrible resignation that reason is not a superhuman gift bestowed on humanity, that it is not an unchanging and eternal deity, that reason evolved in humanity and evolved into what it is, but that it also, however, could have evolved differently … what we hold to be the eternal and unalterably fixed laws of our intellectual being [are] merely a game played by the coincidence that is the world; when we recognise that our reason (which, after all, is language) can only be a coincidental reason, then we will only smile when we consider the argumentative passion with which anthropologists have laboured over questions of custom, belief and collective psychological ‘facts’. The "
― John N. Gray , The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths