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 HUXLEYIf most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
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We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
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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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Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
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But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
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The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
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The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
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It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
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For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols
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Every man’s memory is his private literature.
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The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
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Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
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When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.
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Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
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At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?
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He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
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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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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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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
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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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So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
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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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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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY