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 HUXLEYThe worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Experience teaches only the teachable.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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 -
The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY