Aldous Huxley Quotes
-
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
-
One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.
-
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.
-
In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.
-
Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
-
The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
-
To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
-
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.
-
You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.
-
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
-
There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.
-
Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.
-
Out psychological experiences are all equally facts.
-
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.
-
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.'
-
To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.
-
'If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,' said Jefferson, 'it expects what never was and never will be.'
-
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
-
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
-
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.
-
When will you women understand that one isn’t insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won’t allow one to have.