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John N. Gray Biography

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“All these philosophies(Stoicism,Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism)have a common failing. They imagine life can be ordered by human reason. Either the Mind can devise a way of life that is secure from loss ,or else it can control the emotions so that it can withstand any loss. In fact ,neither how we live nor the emotions we feel can be controlled in this way. Our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body.Much of human life -and much of philosophy - is an attempt to divert ourselves from this fact.”

“The fundamental ethical objection to eugenics is that it licenses some people to decide whether the lives of others are worth living. Part of an intellectual dynasty that included the Victorian uber-Darwinian TH Huxley and the novelist Aldous, Julian Huxley never doubted that an improved human species would match his own high-level brainpower. But not everyone thinks intellect is the most valuable human attribute. General de Gaulle’s daughter Anne had Down’s syndrome, and the famously undemonstrative soldier and Resistance leader referred to her as “my joy”, and when at the age of 20 she died he wept. The capacity to give and receive love may be more central to the good life than self-admiring cleverness.”