Sean Ryan

“Today’s Darwinists will tell you that the task of humanity is to take charge of evolution. But ‘humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. By destabilizing the climate, it is making the planet less hospitable to human life. By developing new technologies of mass communication and warfare, it has set in motion processes of evolution that may end up displacing it.”
― John N. Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom

“There is nothing uniquely human in the flicker of sentience that is commonly called consciousness. Dolphins delight in watching themselves in mirrors when they are having sex, while chimps react to the death of those they care for in much the same ways that humans do. It will be objected that these animals have no clear understanding of the kind of creature they are or what it means to die. In this regard too, however, they are no different from humans.”
― John N. Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom

“When we see a disciplined society, there is often a social hierarchy behind it. This hierarchy, which determines who can eat or mate first, is ultimately rooted in violence.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Everything that exists is a type of matter, he believed, including what we call the soul. We are reluctant to give up the distinction between matter and mind because we cannot imagine matter thinking. But, for Leopardi, the fact that we think shows that matter thinks:”
― John Nicholas Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom