## Metadata * Author: [[John Gray]] * ASIN: B0BQGGB37Y * ISBN: 037460973X * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQGGB37Y ## Highlights There is an unrelenting struggle for the control of thought and language. — location: [59](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=59) ^ref-36700 --- Enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history. — location: [60](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=60) ^ref-29140 --- The new Leviathans offer meaning in material progress, the security of belonging in imaginary communities and the pleasures of persecution. — location: [265](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=265) ^ref-28554 --- Believing they could speed this process through regime change, Western governments plunged into evangelical ‘wars of choice’. — location: [285](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=285) ^ref-2192 --- ‘There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course in which the wind blows.’ — location: [316](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=316) ^ref-40078 --- There is no arc of history, short or long. — location: [327](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=327) ^ref-43800 --- The world of the future will be like that of the past, with disparate regimes interacting with one another in a condition of global anarchy. — location: [330](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=330) ^ref-46945 --- Instead of China becoming more like the West, the West has become more like China. — location: [333](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=333) ^ref-47517 --- In both, the ruling economic system is a version of state capitalism. In each, wealth is heavily concentrated in small groups with powerful political leverage. — location: [333](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=333) ^ref-7704 --- The US is the only advanced society in which catastrophic illness is closely correlated with personal bankruptcy. — location: [337](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=337) ^ref-12510 --- It is also one in which the rich rarely serve prison time. America’s huge incarceration system is filled with the poor, the aged and ethnic minorities. — location: [338](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=338) ^ref-18710 --- When companies like Apple and Tesla invest in China, they give hostages to a strategic rival. — location: [346](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=346) ^ref-61230 --- For many in Washington, derailing China’s advance is the strategic imperative of the age. Blocking China’s access to Western advanced microchip technology, Biden’s Chip Act of August 2022 was effectively a declaration of economic war. — location: [358](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=358) ^ref-28844 --- Lenin’s secret police increased from twenty-three operatives in December 1917 to no fewer than 37,000 in 1919. By 1921 it consisted of around a quarter of a million. — location: [402](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=402) ^ref-38019 --- In 2007, during an annual presidential press conference, Putin linked Orthodoxy and nuclear weapons, remarking: ‘Traditional confessions and the nuclear shield are components that strengthen Russian statehood and create the necessary conditions for providing the state’s internal and external security.’33 Putin’s formula was cited in the mass media, with one journalist summarizing it approvingly: ‘Nuclear Orthodoxy is an eschatological Russian strategy for all time.’ — location: [499](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=499) ^ref-5492 --- The French aristocrat the Marquis de Custine (1790–1857) described his impressions of the country in his Letters from Russia, published in 1843. A conservative who looked on the French Revolution with horror, Custine found in Russia a system so devoted to tyranny, and so wretched, that he believed it could survive only by conquering less despotic countries. ‘The Russian people,’ he wrote, ‘have become unsuited for anything except the conquest of the world … Since I have been to Russia, I have taken a dark view of the future of Europe.’ — location: [579](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=579) ^ref-64233 --- If the state and the people are one and the same, minorities such as the Tibetans and the Uighurs can be suppressed, or obliterated, in the name of public safety. — location: [658](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=658) ^ref-51066 --- Nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit, — location: [725](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=725) ^ref-50471 --- the project of surpassing the scientific and technological advances of liberal societies while preserving social cohesion by means of an intelligent despotism. — location: [734](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=734) ^ref-52559 --- This supposed liberal order is now history. — location: [744](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=744) ^ref-56674 --- The European Union is not an emerging super-state but a crypto-state lacking any military capacity to defend itself. — location: [748](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=748) ^ref-61006 --- Phasing them out completely would ruin states that rely on them for revenues. Bankrupted by falling prices, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia would implode. — location: [759](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=759) ^ref-21136 --- A further twist comes with technologies that have created virtual environments. On Meta and other platforms, cyber-worlds have come into being, — location: [765](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=765) ^ref-23711 --- The metaverse is a projection of the human world, not a way out of it. — location: [770](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=770) ^ref-20510 --- artificial intelligence signal ‘an end to the illusion of technology as human beings exercising control over nature, rather than the other way round’. — location: [830](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=830) ^ref-1644 --- life had meaning only as an aesthetic experience. — location: [911](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=911) ^ref-51731 --- Beauty was worth more than truth or goodness – more, even, than civilization. — location: [912](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=912) ^ref-45339 --- would it not be horrible and downright injurious to think that Moses ascended Mount Sinai, that the Hellenes built their graceful acropolises, the Romans waged their Punic wars, Alexander, that handsome genius, crossed the Granicus in a plumed helmet and fought at Arbela, that the prophets preached, the martyrs agonized, the poets sang, the artists painted and knights gleamed in tournaments – only in order that the French, German, or Russian bourgeois in his ugly and comic clothes should thrive ‘individually and collectively’ on the ruins of all this magnificent past? — location: [920](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=920) ^ref-61538 --- When he feared that a cult of individualism would threaten cultural diversity, he identified a pathology of liberal civilization. — location: [933](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=933) ^ref-57205 --- Freedom in lifestyle means obedience to fashion. — location: [935](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=935) ^ref-28679 --- The inner lives of supposedly autonomous individuals, their hopes and dreams, are remarkably alike. — location: [938](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=938) ^ref-8512 --- Russia became an impoverished version of the bourgeois — location: [958](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=958) ^ref-12209 --- The Polish government raised the issue with the American and British authorities, who colluded with the Soviets in denying any knowledge of the killings. — location: [1425](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=1425) ^ref-34404 --- ‘There are writers who muddy their own water, in order to make it seem deeper. — location: [1495](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=1495) ^ref-61446 --- freedom had been almost eradicated for the sake of maximizing happiness. — location: [1522](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=1522) ^ref-2512 --- Any Utopia must be dystopian, for a life of rational harmony is the death of the soul. — location: [1571](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=1571) ^ref-7215 --- While in gaol, — location: [1670](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=1670) ^ref-29956 --- It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; — location: [1841](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=1841) ^ref-32319 --- Western elites are renouncing tolerance in much the same way pagan elites abandoned their old gods. — location: [1941](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=1941) ^ref-15066 --- bill of rights may be useful in codifying liberties and entitlements, but it will be viable only insofar as it expresses values that are widely shared in society. — location: [1965](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=1965) ^ref-49403 --- When there are deep and abiding ethical divisions, rights are overturned by the political capture of the judiciary. — location: [1966](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=1966) ^ref-61881 --- The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. — location: [2083](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=2083) ^ref-49324 --- Freud commented: ‘In the Middle Ages they would have burned me; nowadays they are content with burning my books.’ — location: [2306](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=2306) ^ref-16864 --- Wherein you have no power, therein neither should you will.’) — location: [2357](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=2357) ^ref-3893 --- modern atheists deify humanity in order to preserve the God they have lost. — location: [2436](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0BQGGB37Y&location=2436) ^ref-5393 ---