John N. Gray

“From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.”

“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.”

“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”

“Dickens enjoyed human beings as he found them, unregenerate, peculiar and incorrigibly themselves.”

“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.”

“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.”