Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
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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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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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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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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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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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Experience teaches only the teachable…
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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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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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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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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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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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Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
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Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
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Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.
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I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
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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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The proper study of mankind is books.
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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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And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.
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Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
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So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.