Aldous Huxley Quotes
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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.
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The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
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The unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground has, as its necessary condition, self-abnegation and charity. Only by means of self-abnegation and charity can we clear away the evil, folly and ignorance which constitute the thing we call our personality and prevent us from becoming aware of the spark of divinity illuminating the inner man.
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How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called 'numinous'. Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.
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Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.
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Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
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The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
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The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.
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The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg - eight ninths below the water line, one ninth above.
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Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
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Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
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You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.
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At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?
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Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.
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Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.
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Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.
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At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
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Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
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What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful.
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Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.
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Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
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Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.
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Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know-one can’t escape it-but fictional characters are oversimplified; they’re much less complex than the people one knows.
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Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.