Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals QUOTES

1 " As commonly practiced, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs. "

― John Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

2 " Over the past two hundred years philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error -the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals. "

― John Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

3 " The Buddha promised release from something we all understand: suffering. By contrast, no one can say what was the original sin, and no one understands how the suffering of Christ can redeem it. "

― John Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

4 " Where affluence is the rule, the true threat is the loss of desire,(...) What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices "

― John N. Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

5 " If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself. "

― John N. Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

6 " Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies.

If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life. "

― John N. Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

7 " The Buddhist ideal of awakening implies that we can sever our links with our evolutionary past. We can raise ourselves from the sleep in which other animals pass their lives. Our illusions dissolved, we need no longer suffer. This is only another doctrine of salvation, subtler than that of the Christians, but no different from Christianity in its goal of leaving our animal inheritance behind.
But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. meditation may give us a fresher view of things but cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. "

― John Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

8 " Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals.

A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery. "

― John N. Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

9 " 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 , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

10 " Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can do so only because they ignore history . Pogroms are as old as Christendom , but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. (..) Scientific fundamentalism claim that science is the disinterested pursuit of the truth. But to represent science in this way is to disregard the human needs science serves. Among us science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up. "

― John Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

11 " In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury--or else a disability. "

― John Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

12 " Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth- and to be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals. (...) There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution.(...) Among humans, the best deceivers are those who deceive themselves: 'we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better'. A lover who promises eternal fidelity s more likely to be believed if he believes his promise himself; he is no more likely to keep his promise.(...) In a competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage. "

― John Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

13 " 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 , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

14 " We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. When we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind what we do. Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated. Most of our life in enacted without conscious awareness. Nor can it be made conscious. No degree of self-awareness can make us self-transparent. "

― John N. Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

15 " Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war. "

― John N. Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

16 " 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 , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

17 " Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer. "

― John N. Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

18 " humankind's presence on Earth is nothing but a cancer "

― John N. Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

19 " Those who struggle to change the world see themselves as noble, even tragic figures. Yet most of those who work for world betterment are not rebels against the scheme of things. They seek consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear. At bottom, their faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a denial of their own mortality. "

― John N. Gray , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

20 " 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 , Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals