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.
ALDOUS HUXLEYChildren 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.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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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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The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
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He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
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Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
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If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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.
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 -
A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
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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There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
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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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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