Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
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To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
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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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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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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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An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
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To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
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It's a bit embarrassing... to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'
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There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.
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Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
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No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labour, no cash crops, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.
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It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression.
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The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.
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Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.
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All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.
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One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.
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Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
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In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.
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Out psychological experiences are all equally facts.
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You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.
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From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it science actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences-the experiences of sense.
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'If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,' said Jefferson, 'it expects what never was and never will be.'
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Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.