Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
ALDOUS HUXLEYIf human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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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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An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
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Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.
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The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
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You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
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Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.
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He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
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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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Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
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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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life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything
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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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The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
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Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
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The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work’ with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
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The development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
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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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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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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 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 trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
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There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
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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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Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom.
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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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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