If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
ALDOUS HUXLEYPeople often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
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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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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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No social stability without individual stability.
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Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
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Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.
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Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.
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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.
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Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
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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.
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A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.
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When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.
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Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.
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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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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.
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Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
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All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
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There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
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Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
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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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My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
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Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
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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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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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The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
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Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.
ALDOUS HUXLEY