Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.
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Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
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The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious-it makes little or no difference.
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To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
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However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
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People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
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Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
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A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.
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We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
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In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.
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In the old dramas it was love that had to be sacrificed to painful duty. In the modern instance the sacrifice is at the shrine of what William James called 'the Bitch Goddess, Success.' Love is to be abandoned for the stern pursuit of newspaper notoriety and dollars.
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Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
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Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.
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Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
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Words are good servants but bad masters.
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Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.
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Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?
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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
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The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.
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One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time-that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.
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Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.
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Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.