If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
ALDOUS HUXLEYIn regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.
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The 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.
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Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
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Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
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My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
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If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
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It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
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The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
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The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.
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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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All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.
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Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
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Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
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At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?
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It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
ALDOUS HUXLEY