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Book: Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Quotes of Book: Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans
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  1. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    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.
    book-quotemoralitytragedygreek-mythology

  2. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    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.
    book-quotelifemanhumanity

  3. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.
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  4. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    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."
    book-quotehumansthe-endextinction

  5. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    Today we have made a fetish of choice; but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life.
    book-quotelifesuicidehumans

  6. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    Human knowledge is one thing, human wellbeing another. There is no predetermined harmony between the two. The examined life may not be worth living.
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  7. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them. In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.
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  8. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    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.
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  9. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    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.
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  10. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    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.
    book-quotehumansextinctionthe-coast-opposite-of-humanity

  11. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    humankind's presence on Earth is nothing but a cancer
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  12. John Gray _ Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

    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.
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