Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
ALDOUS HUXLEYHuman beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.
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In 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.
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We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
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He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
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Experience teaches only the teachable.
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The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
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But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
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The 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.
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Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.
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So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
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Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
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In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
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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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY