Aldous Huxley Quotes
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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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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 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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It is only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.
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The proper study of mankind is books.
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There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
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So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
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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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The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many be corrupted.
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God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.
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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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History teaches us that war is not inevitable. Once again, it is for us to choose whether we use war or some other method of settling the ordinary and unavoidable conflicts between groups of men.
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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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And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.
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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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Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.
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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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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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It is a political axiom that power follows property.
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What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.
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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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Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
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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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For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.