180 Quotes by John Gray

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.

More than Christianity, the religion of Victorian times was a belief in human advance - the conviction that freed from ignorance and superstition, humanity could expand its power and be master of its destiny.

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

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.

بعد أن تعلم أهل المريخ كيف ينصتون حققوا أعظم اكتشاف مدهش، لقد بدأوا يدركون أن الانصات لزهرية تتحدث عن مشكلات يمكن حقا أن يساعدهم على الخروج من كهوفهم، مثلما هو الحال عند مشاهدة مبارة في التلفزيون أو قراءة الصحف.

كانت أصعب مهمة بالنسبة إلى سوزان هي أن تتدرب على طلب ما تريد، قالت لي "لماذا يجب علي أن أطلب بعد كل ما فعلت من أجله؟!؛ وضحت لها أن تحمليه مسئولية معرفة رغباتها ليس فقط غير واقعي، بل هو سبب جزء كبير من مشكلتها. كانت تحتاج إلى أن تكون مسئولة عن جعل رغباتها تتحقق.

History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers. Today GM crops are being marketed as the only means of avoiding mass starvation. They are unlikely to improve the lives of peasant farmers ; but they may well enable them to survive in greater numbers.

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.

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.