For 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
ALDOUS HUXLEYFor 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
ALDOUS HUXLEYThe development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
ALDOUS HUXLEYChildren 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.
ALDOUS HUXLEYHitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.
ALDOUS HUXLEYThe most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
ALDOUS HUXLEYThe victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.
ALDOUS HUXLEYThe survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
ALDOUS HUXLEYThe most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
ALDOUS HUXLEYPeople will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
ALDOUS HUXLEYThe world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
ALDOUS HUXLEYDon’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.
ALDOUS HUXLEYThe greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEYLiberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.
ALDOUS HUXLEYThe worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
ALDOUS HUXLEYEvery ceiling reached becomes a floor.
ALDOUS HUXLEYBeware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
ALDOUS HUXLEY