But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
ALDOUS HUXLEYI wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Human 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.
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To be a fool at the right time is also an art.
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
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To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
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After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
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If you don’t gamble, you’ll never win.
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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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The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
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Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
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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.
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.
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The 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.
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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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Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
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The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.
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Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.
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The more you know, the more you see
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Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.
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Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
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Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
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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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The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
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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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If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.
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Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom.
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As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom…it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
ALDOUS HUXLEY