Aldous Huxley Quotes
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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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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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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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Experience teaches only the teachable…
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The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
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It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.
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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.
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My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.
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The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
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Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.
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Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.
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All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
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I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
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Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
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A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour, and survival a thing beyond the bounds of possibility.
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All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours
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Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
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It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.
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The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
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If good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest breast with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy songs, those love longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied.
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Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently - though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society
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Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
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The proper study of mankind is books.
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And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.