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.
ALDOUS HUXLEYExperience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
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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.
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One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
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Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
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Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
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A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
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Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
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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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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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The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.
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All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
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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 -
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
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Children 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.
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When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.
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Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.
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Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
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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.
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Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
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A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
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Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
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Every man’s memory is his private literature.
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People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
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Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
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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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY