A FEW INTERESTING QUOTES FROM BOOK BY JOHN GRAY
"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 uncooth, cruel, without animal dignity - from the point of view of the highly civilized apes, a barbaric relapse of history." 1
"The idea that imperialism could be a force for human advance has long since fallen into disrepute. But the faith that was once attached to Empire has not been renounced. Instead it has spread everywhere. Even those who nominally follow more traditional creeds rely on a belief in the future for their mental composure. History may be a succession of absurdities, tragedies and crimes; but- everyone insists - the future can still be better than anything in the past." 4
"Humanity is, of course, not marching anywhere. 'Humanity' is a fiction composed from billions of induviduals for each of whom life is singular and final. But the myth of progress is extremely potent." 7
"But as Conrad understood, it is not only the government that is tainted by criminality. All human institutions - families and churches, police forces and anarchists - are stained by crime. Explaining human nastiness by reference to corrupt institutions leaves a question: why are humans so attached to corruption? Clearly the answer is in the human animal itself." 10
"As Malaparte saw it, Naples was a pagan city with an ancient sense of time. Christianity taught those who were converted to it to think of history as the unfolding of a single plot - a moral drama of sin and redemption. In the ancient world there was no such plot - only a multitude of stories that were forever being repeated. Inhabiting that ancient world, the Neopolitans did not expect any fundemental alteration from human affairs. Not having accepted the Christian story of redemption, they had not been seduced by the myth of progress." 22
“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth." 49
" 'We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.' This power is above all over human beings; but it is also power over the material world. 'Already our control over matter is absolute... There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation - anything... You must get rid of those nineteenth-century laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.' " 50
"It is not only mass poverty that makes the new capitalism hard to live in. In America more than anywhere else the belief that each person's life can be a story of continuing improvement has been part of the psyche. In the new economy, where a disjointed existence is the common lot, this is a story that makes no sense. When the meaning of life is projected into the future, how are people to live when the future can no longer be imagined?" 68
"Right in thinking that capitalism contains a potential for self-destruction, Marx was wrong in believing that capitalism would be followed by a lasting mode of production. Wealth can be created in many kinds of economic system, but never for long. The human animal consumes what it has produced, and then moves on." 71
"If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas." 75
"Every human culture is animated by myth, in some degree, while no other animal displays anything similar. Humanists are also ruled by myths, though the ones by which they are possessed have none of the beauty or wisdom of those that they scorn. The myth that human beings can use their minds to lift themselves out of the natural world, which in Socrates and Plato was part of a mystical philosphy, has been renewed in a garbled version of the language of evolution." 77
"Admitting our lives are shaped by fictions may give a kind of freedom - possibly the only kind that human beings can attain. Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from the confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob the world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens us to the world that exists beyond ourselves." 108
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