The Silence of Animals Quotes

“To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.”
― John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“In comparison with the Genesis myth, the modern myth in which humanity is marching to a better future is mere superstition. As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our madness. But – as the Genesis myth also teaches – there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know . . . The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our nature.”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“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.”
― John Nicholas Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.”
― John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Like cheap music, the myth of progress lifts the spirits as it numbs the brain.”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“History may be a succession of absurdities, tragedies and crimes; but – everyone insists – the future can still be better than anything in the past. To give up this hope would induce a state of despair”
― John Nicholas Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“A type of atheism that refused to revere humanity would be a genuine advance.”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of the police and of its opinion.”
― John Nicholas Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“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 Nicholas Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“According to the theory, human beings do not deal with conflicting beliefs and perceptions by testing them against facts.”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Perhaps Hitler’s genius was not demagogy, not lying, but the fundamentally irrational approach to the masses, the appeal to the pre-logical, totemistic mentality.”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Unknown to itself, the human mind creates worlds it cannot grasp. The places that are made by humans are as numinous and fugitive as those that appear in forest shade. Breaking the spell of diurnal perception, you can see landscapes in cities as unexpected as those that explorers discover in uncharted regions of the globe. A”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Ordinary language was a form of life that needed - and permitted - nothing beyond itself. Humans were figures in a world they had themselves made.”
― John Nicholas Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“When truth is at odds with meaning, it is meaning that wins. Why this should be so is a delicate question. Why is meaning so important? Why do humans need a reason to live? Is it because they could not endure life if they did not believe it contained hidden significance? Or does the demand for meaning come from attaching too much sense to language – from thinking that our lives are books we have not yet learnt to read?”
― John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“[Freud] continued to believe that only science produced anything that could be called knowledge. Everything else was just illusion. At the same time he came to think that illusions were not just errors. Serving the human need for meaning, illusion had a place in life, and so did myth. Science itself had some of the attributes of mythology. But if this is so then purging the mind of myth, which at times Freud saw as the aim of psychoanalysis, is impossible. A life without myths is itself the stuff of myth.”
― John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Ichthyophils imagine that human beings want a life in which they can make their own choices. But what if they can be fulfilled only by a life in which they follow each other? The majority who obey the fashion of the day may be acting on a secret awareness that they lack the potential for a truly individual existence. Liberalism – the ichthyophil variety, at any rate – teaches that everyone yearns to be free. Herzen’s experience of the abortive European revolutions of 1848 led him to doubt that this was so. It was because of his disillusionment that he criticized Mill so sharply. But if it is true that Mill was deluded in thinking that everyone loves freedom, it may also be true that without this illusion there would be still less freedom in the world. The charm of a liberal way of life is that it enables most people to renounce their freedom unknowingly Allowing the majority of humankind to imagine they are flying fish even as they pass their lives under the waves, liberal civilization rests on a dream”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and to believe in it willingly.”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong; what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervour about convincing and converting other people to his view.”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“The end of psychoanalysis – an interminable process, Freud warned – is the acceptance of a personal fate.”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“how are people to live when the future can no longer be imagined?”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“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

“Nowadays myths can be practically momentary: transmitted throughout the world by 24-hour news and the internet, they spread virally, entering the minds of tens and hundreds of millions of people in minutes or hours. Are these true myths, or mass-manufactured fantasies? At times they can be both. In recent years images of resistance to tyranny have been relayed around the world by mass media, many of them captured on mobile phones by the resisters themselves. The myths of revolution that moved the resisters were reinforced, for a time, by the media that make the news. But myths survive for only as long as they are enacted by those who accept them. As popular uprisings go through their normal sequence of rebellion, anarchy and renewed tyranny, the myth of revolution dissipates to be replaced by new myths of conspiracy and betrayal. Myths”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Nowadays myths can be practically momentary: transmitted throughout the world by 24-hour news and the internet, they spread virally, entering the minds of tens and hundreds of millions of people in minutes or hours. Are these true myths, or mass-manufactured fantasies? At times they can be both. In recent years images of resistance to tyranny have been relayed around the world by mass media, many of them captured on mobile phones by the resisters themselves. The myths of revolution that moved the resisters were reinforced, for a time, by the media that make the news. But myths survive for only as long as they are enacted by those who accept them. As popular uprisings go through their normal sequence of rebellion, anarchy and renewed”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths